Queen Victoria’s Secret: Chapter 15.11

-xxii-

              Napoleon united us and our allies against him; the Congress of Vienna is reducing us all to bickering Lilliputians, squabbling over every yard of territory, every end of an egg. But England visibly trembles with excitement at the thought of hosting the cream of Europe, the royalty, the aristocracy, the military and political titans. For the Regent, though, this tide of cream is rather sour, involving, as it does, herculean labours of ostentation, logistics, pomp, and pageantry – all of it on a scale never before contemplated, indeed never seen, at least not here, or not since Elizabeth Tudor. It is the prelude to our ascendency as leader of the world, our destiny, our true role and the will of our God. But it doesn’t look like this to those little people who make our megalopolis what it is and what what it will become.

              Late the following day, May 12^th, Weatherall meets Edward for tea at White’s.

               “Well,’ he says, ‘the new Bourbon didn’t get himself off to a very good start, did he?”

                “Ah. What happened? I haven’t heard a thing since he disappeared over the Narrow Sea.”

              Parisians, so it seems, weren’t that happy on May 4th at the sight of their gouty, overstuffed new monarch crammed into his dingy old carriage. The peasants

particularly viewed the Bourbons as lackies of the Allies; they were fearful for their lands too, with all the returning nobility eager to reclaim property. And Louis had been intensely annoyed to find that French public opinion generally considered Russia had won the war. He was still more annoyed to find that the czar, still basking in the lustre of his role as saviour, evidently thought so too. Yet there was soon something to annoy Alexander as well. 

             Louis’ farewell declaration to the Prince Regent, recently published in many London papers, has now reached Paris, and in it the King of France stated: It is to the counsels of Your Royal Highness, to this glorious country, and the steadfastness of its inhabitants, that I attribute the reestablishment of my House on the throne of its ancestors… It went on so effusively that a reader utterly ignorant of events over the past few years would assume that Wales had himself single-handedly crushed Napoleon and liberated Europe.

               “That’s going to make George’s task even more difficult than he already expects it to be,” Edward remarks, thinking that Louis had kept his promise a little too extravagantly.

             “I see the King of Prussia can’t be bothered  to attend,” Weatherall continues.

             “Too shy? Or most probably too embarrassed? He wasn’t exactly overwhelming early in the war, was he? Lucky he had any armies left. He’ll probably send Blucher to represent Prussia – at least he can claim some victories. I’m told his men nicknamed him ‘Marshal Forwards’, on account of his extremely aggressive attitude in a battle…” Edward is glad to be back on ground he understands far better than Planet Wales.

             ‘What about King Francis?’ Weatherall asks of the Austrian monarch. ‘You think the shame of marrying his daughter to Napoleon might keep him away too?’

              ‘I doubt it; he must be keen to show he’s firmly with the Coalition now his son-in-law is banished. Pity memories can’t be so easily removed. Anyway, Metternich will certainly be representing Austria, and he’s far more interesting: believes negotiation is preferable to war. I just hope there aren’t going to be any negotiations here. No one’s prepared to sit down with the likes of Metternich — he could run circles around most politicians I can think of. And, talking of cunning, Talleyrand is evidently trying to represent France at Vienna, since he’s already managed to make himself King Louis’ Foreign Minister – amazing! But no one wants France at the main negotiating table. That’s just for us, the Coalition, the major powers. Considering they recently ruled most of the continent, it must be humiliating for the French to find themselves no longer a ‘major power’, mustn’t it? I’ll wager Talleyrand will find a way in, all the same. He’s an eel…” How nice it is to be talking again so freely, no war to dampen the spirits. But, he thinks, you get an odd sense of foreboding, don’t you? It’s not supposed to be this peaceful and carefree on the earth — otherwise we’d never leave the bloody place, would we?

                Over breakfast a few days later, when they’re still discussing these matters, Julie announces, once again darkly, that Fouchet too has managed to wheedle himself back into office as King Louis’ Minister of Police.

             “God, those two are resilient, aren’t they? How do you know that?” And why are you telling me? he thinks. 

               After months of worrying silence, she’s finally received a letter from Rose, who now sounds quite hopeful about her future after a long period of uncertainty.

               “In the abdication instrument Talleyrand drafted for Napoleon,” Julie tells him, “it was agreed that Rose could keep Malmaison and its contents, as well as getting a pension for life of one million francs a year. The Czar now visits her often as well, Rose says, and he’s promised his personal protection for her children and herself. They’ve become quite good friends…” 

              Indeed, things are looking up all over for Rose. Prince Frederick of Mecklenberg-Streilitz – a nephew of Queen Charlotte – has proposed marriage to her; but he’s half her age, so she doesn’t even answer him. She mourns Napoleon, constantly dreaming and thinking of him – although she can’t mention this with her new friends. She seems unwell; and she’s wearied by all the entertaining she must do for King Louis’ court, which is her role these days.

              Christ, he thinks, one million francs! I should try losing a war if it pays so well. “Ah,” says Edward. ‘Her ‘role’, eh? Yet what happens when Alexander returns to Russia? Will Louis continue to uphold any of those promises?”

                 “She has many friends in the new government,” replies Julie confidently, spreading marmalade on her toast before adding, “Besides, it’s not so new. The army might have pledged allegiance to King Louis, but Rose says many still support Napoleon in their hearts. And it’s the same with many politicians; what’s more, the aristocrats who are returned to power, many of them, are people she personally rescued from exile… or else she had family connections with before the Revolution. Remember, she may have married Napoleon, but prior to that she was a Beauharnais. She lost her husband to the guillotine, and narrowly avoided the same fate herself. So, she has credentials on both sides of the fence. She’ll be all right whatever the future holds, I’m sure of it…” If only Julie could be this sure of her own future, he thinks.

                “Does she hear from him on Elba?”

               “He’s denied any communications at present. Even his mother can’t write to him. Nor can Marie-Louise – though I doubt she wants to. The son will probably grow up Austrian… perhaps with no idea who his father even was…”

          Edward knows that Napoleon once said he’d rather see his son’s throat cut than have him grow up Austrian. Like my own son, he thinks, saying, “So they fear him still, do they? Such restrictions are less than fair for so great a man…” 

               “There’s confusion, I think, which always brings fear in its train. The economy’s a shambles; prices are high; there’s no work; most of the young men are dead; banditry is rife in the provinces… and no one likes seeing French cities occupied by Russians, Prussians and Austrians – it’s natural. Who enjoys being invaded?”

              “Rose doesn’t seem to mind being ‘occupied’ by the Czar…” He wonders if he can rtsk a little wit on his edgy wife.

              He can’t, but it’s too late now. Julie throws her toast at him, saying, “With your family, I wouldn’t criticize anyone’s conduct if I were you…”

                  He laughs, peeling the toast from his shirtsleeve. ‘I’ve always found,’ he says, ‘that Rose is more interested in Rose than she is in her country…’

               “And your main interest is not yourself, I suppose?” she scoffs, with that shaft of darkness now in her voice again.

             “Unjust! I was brought up to put my country first – and, to the best of my ability, I always have…’

              ‘Yes,’ she says, ‘but the pity is your country seems to put you last…’

            Touche. ‘Ah. Well… Let’s not bicker,’ he says. ‘These have been difficult years for everyone. You may even get to ask the Czar yourself if he intends to fulfill his promises to Rose…”

              “Really? I would ask too, you know…”

           He does know, but he says, ‘“Let’s see if he’ll even talk to my brother first…” A strange lassitude is coming over him, and at the same time a feeling that his journey is approaching the  crossroads. The problem is that no map of his route exists, so when the cross is reached, which way to head? He seeks a solution on the square, where he often takes problems. Of the many assets a lodge in London has, perhaps the greatest is access to and companionship with some of the finest minds alive. He likes to keep this confidential, as do the finest minds or you’d know about them now. We respect his wishes, and will continue to respect them. 

He now thinks: War does make things far more lively, doesn’t it? Long as it’s not too near. But does this explain why people seem to be far nicier to one another when doom threatens? The thought of having Boney’s boot smashing your noggin into omelette tomorrow probably forces decency on you. 

-xxiii-

                No one would characterize the Prince Regent as ‘god-like’ – he’s barely even human much of the time– yet this epithet is now frequently used by newspapers to describe the appearance and demeanour of Alexander, Czar of All the Russias, when he steps onto our fair shores. It buzzes around the Regent’s roseate head like a wasp after jam; but he has other problems to deal with – many of them too. He’d planned to meet the czar — the tall, blond, god-like czar — at Shooter’s Hill, in Woolwich, not far from the military academy, where poor Eduard de Salaberry had been trained and where he harboured his dreams of glory. Wales was then supposed to accompany the deity of the Steppes to a grand welcoming banquet at Carlton House. But Alexander did not wish to go to Carlton House. He wished to join his sister at Pulteney’s Hotel – and Wales could instinctively tell that the czar was not a man whose wishes you deny. He wouldn’t even understand what denial is.Thus Wales accompanied him to Piccadilly, where he told Alexander, as courteously as he could manage, that he’d rendezvous with his Imperial Majesty and the Grand Duchess Katherine later that evening, to bring them over to Pall Mall. As Wales tells Edward – who’s once again called Kent — later that day, ‘That fucking bitch’s name makes me sick! You know what I think, Eddie – Kent I mean?’

            ‘No,’ says Kent, who loathes this rhetorical device. ‘But I’m sure you’ll tell me…’

               ‘She’s his spy; she arrived early to assess, judge and condemn everything in England – particularly me. That great lanky prick was so condescending…Ugh!’ He coughs this up to make sure the memory doesn’t fester inside him. But he now also worries, among a thousand other worries, that Carlton House is not grand enough for the czar. What little he knows of St. Petersberg – traveller’s tales, pictures, hearsay – convinces him the place is fabulously opulent – no, preposterously opulent. Yet he gets such diabolically bad advice. No one has told him Alexander lives on a modest island in the river, where he leads a fairly spartan existence, praying a lot, reading his Bible, kissing icons. ‘Jesus God almighty!’ Wales now says. ‘The money I’m paying for that fucking hotel!’ The future tense would have been more accurate, since Pulteney’s would have let off fireworks if a florin of the Regent’s sat in their strongbox. He starts looking through newspapers now, the same newspapers he imagines also lie on a table in the most expensive set of apartments Pulteney’s Hotel can provide. ‘Fucking hell,’ he squeaks. ‘God in bloody heaven!’ He calls urgently for brandy. Urgently!

                  Every one of these accursed rags has a lengthy article detailing his own disgraceful treatment of his wife and young daughter. A couple of them also claim he’s had his own poor father chained to a dungeon wall in Windsor Castle, where the sad old king is regularly scourged, sometimes even dunked into vats of freezing water. It’s not exactly a lie; but it’s not exactly the truth either. In Edward’s experience of the press, it never is, not exactly anyway. Wales’ press image has never been what you might call good, but it’s never been this bad – and at such a time too! You sympathize a little with him, because it is a good deal worse than usual today. There are also cartoons of him, and they can only be described as grotesque, profoundly humiliating on purpose, suggesting to readers that their Regent is a national joke, the hilariously vile two-ton freak in the sideshow called Piccadilly. Jesus! Wakes sees the czar and his sister guffawing together in their pricey rooms, laughing themselves dizzy over the bloated oaf who rules England, weeping with mirth as they beat their chair arms, throwing up clouds of dirty English dust. ‘What am I supposed to do with this, this, this?’ He cannot find the words, or perhaps doesn’t want to find them.

               It brings Edward close to tears as well. He doesn’t like seeing anyone or anything hurt, and this one is hurt very badly. We’re all so vulnerable, aren’t we?  ‘It’s just the press,’ he says consolingly. ‘They’ll know that…’

                  ‘You print this in Russia,’ yells the Regent, smoke in his crimson mouth, ‘they feed you your own liver while you’re boiled alive – and that’s just the entree… Christ! I could weep…’ He could, but instead of weeping, he smashes a group of porcelain shepherdesses. ‘Which clodhopping fuckwit thought it was a good idea to let newspapers print whatever the fuck they feel like printing?’ he screams. Obviously, his vaunted control of the press is rather more limited than he’d claimed. Even Napoleon had been obliged to shut down a hundred papers to get himself some fair treatment by journalists. Yet you can’t do this in England anymore – or not easily. Wales dreams of absolutism, the old days and old ways: the rack, the xyster, the iron maiden, the flaying, the axeman still sharpening his blade. Set some examples, Wales is thinking; get some respect. Where’s the fucking respect gone? Then, finally, he does cry, a huge pink baby swaddled in damask. Those days are gone, he tells himself, and they won’t come back. Czarmaggeddon is here to stay. God help us! He blows his streaming nose in a newspaper, smearing printer’s ink over the twin balloons of his glowing cheeks.

               ‘Well,’ says Kent, about to leave, because he needs air agin, ‘good luck for tonight, George…’

                “Luck? I don’t need good luck,” Wales rumbles. “What I need is is a weapon nothing can withstand, and a good government, not that fucking dozey, stupid, know-nothing, pud-pulling, pox-ridden coven of sissies! We need some real laws here, not the fucking limp-wristed suggestions that moon-faced crew of big girls dash off on their scented notepaper! I wipe my arse with that!” The steam has run out; and he’s not really talking to Kent anyway. He’s not really talking to anyone, not even himself.

             Edward says, ‘Right then…’ He wishes Maria Fitzherbert were still around, and wonders if Wales does too, You don’t ask him that, though —  God, o! He needs someone who loves him at a time like this, someone to stroke his boiling head and tell him it’ll be all right, not to worry. Maria did love him. But does anyone else, has anyone else ever loved him? ‘We’ll get through this, Georgie,’ he tells him, ‘you’ll see – right through it…’ He strides purposefully for the door before Wales, whose stare is now unnerving, can say another word.

His strides are not quite quick enough, for as the door is closing behind him, the Regent’s howl batters against the panelling: ‘Fuck you, bird-brain! That’s your idea of useful fucking advice, is it? Garrgh…’ And whatever the rest of this thought was to be melts forever through the marble and down into the dank foundations of Carlton House.

                As events transpire, though, what Wales really most needs that night is not to have an angry mob outside his palazzo demonstrating its disgust with the “information” in today’s papers.

            ‘Shame-shame!’ they shout. A lot. 

           Preparing to leave for Pulteney’s Hotel to collect the perfidious Russians, the Regent is told he can’t safely venture beyond his sturdy doors.  

              ‘We want a decent Regent’, yells the mob, managing to make adjective and noun rhyme faultlessly. Rocks are hurled, damaging a few closed shutters. The air has that tang of incipient thunder in it, but it emanates from the mob not the sky. And the mob is growing, as if it’s breeding in there more mobs, countless mobs, climbing up the walls and dancing on his roof. Soon both Piccadilly and Pall Mall are blocked, and no traffic gets through, not even the hackneys – not even those using Shank’s pony.

                A further humiliation now rides down from heaven and jumps at the Regent’s face, stopping him dead in his track, as he’s apprised of the situation outside, which seems to him markedly worse than it was five minutes earlier. Are they lying to him? He peeks through slats in a shatter, No, it would seem they aren’t lying. Where the hell do all these people come from? But this is not what he’s facing at all, this mob. He’s now obliged to send the czar a note stating that “minor disturbances” in the streets – normal at this time of year, of course — make it impossible for him to travel out, much to his bitter disappointment. But what can you do when your people need to have their fun, eh? What can you do? But he’ll look forward even more keenly to becoming better acquainted with Alexander at the gala tomorrow evening. My deepest regrets etc. Great, thinks Wales now, knowing exactly how Alexander will read this screed: The oaf can’t even keep the peace in his own capital, Katherine, hey? Then some corrosive Russian proverb, no doubt. Wales stares at a stretch of tangerine silk wall paper for a moment, and then kicks it so hard his foot goes six inches through the plaster and lath, his shoe breaks off, lodged in the wall, as he looks into a mirror tenderly, almost smiling, and then he screams so loudly that a Chinese urn nearby hums and window panes buzz: ‘Can someone tell ne why is this happening to me?’ Each word is treated as if it’s unique, with pauses between them, like music, yet no intonation, as if he’s chanting. Because Wales has no one who will tell him anything now, not even Jesus or God. He nods to his own face energetically, expecting it to nod back. But it doesn’t.                  The Regent is certain there will be some respite. Things are like that: up and then down.

                Next day, the midday papers make him freeze in mid-action, the kipper poised on the rim of his mouth. Now he gags, now he bucks like a yearling.  He allows this newspaper to float away and drift to the floor whispering as it goes, snatching up another, and another, and another, going through each of them like a blind man, who turns and turns and turns because he has no need to stop on any page. These rags all have versions of the same story: How the “self-effacing, tall, handsome, god-like Czar Alexander” had taken a dawn stroll in the park with his sister, as if they were just ordinary folk, exchanging greetings, offering civilities, and not the least bit concerned by the crowd following them at a respectful distance. My goodness, they’re not even accompanied by guards… unlike some people we know. So great is the czar’s divine simplicity that, returned to the front steps of his and Pulteney’s hotel, he takes off his hat and bows to the adoring horde of onlookers, who cheer long after he and his sister have vanished inside. How fortunate are the Russian people to have an emperor of such modesty, such courtesy, and such inordinately great good looks! Such golden hair, such celestial nobility, such imposing height, effuse others. If only we were so lucky! 

               It does not get better. It gets worse. A cartoon – yes, another vile cartoon — which shows the Prince Regent, a gigantic bawling babe trapped in a Carlton House so insufficient for his porcine bulk that his head sticks through the roof. And a mob pelts it with, of course, dung; while, towering even in the far distance, a god-like czar strolls, strolls as if our acres were his own acres, smiling serenely to sweepers, tramps, soldiers and aristocrats alike, as they in turn raise their hats to him. Fuck: the expletive could well be branded on Wales’ forehead now. The caption reads: ‘Georgie want walky in park too!’, as a matronly figure replies, ‘Then Georgie have to behave like that good Emperor Alexander if he’s to be allowed outside the nursery…’

             ‘Oh. No!’ says Edward, reading the same papers down in Kensington. ‘It makes you feel very sorry for him, doesn’t it?’

              ‘Not really,’ Julie says. ‘Not really…’

              ‘Don’t be so heartless, my love. He’s my brother. And he will soon be our king.’

             ‘Then God help England,’ she says, pausing briefly before adding, ‘I suppose we can always move…’

‘I can’t,’ he tells her, anxiety scribbling on his brow. ‘I have to go where I’m told to go…’

‘I know,’ she says. ‘Sad isn’t it? I’ll have to move on my own then, won’t I?’

He’s about to fire off a barrage of objections and hurts, but he lets the ammunition slide down and back to its arsenal, staring at her instead, but not really seeing her. He feels the saliva drying on his gums, and has to close his mouth before it atrophies. 

              ‘I thought that would shut you up,’ she says. And she’s right – it has.

Queen Victoria’s Secret: Chapter 15.10

     Count Leven, the Russian Ambassador, is obliged to threaten resignation before Katherine backs off; although she doesn’t pay up or cut down. With Wales shoved from the front of her mind to some cobwebbed nook or cranny at the back of it, or in its cellar, she now concentrates on another obscenely ill-advised project aimed at the only thing in Wales’ hellish parody of a life that he probably treasures more than himself. She embarks on a studied crusade of charm designed to befriend the young Princess Royal, Charlotte, whose treatment she has found disgraceful, and will now decide is even more disgraceful than she’d originally found it to be. Indeed, she finds everything in which the Regent has a hand, interest, or even a passing fancy thoroughly obnoxious. She soon finds everything about young Charlotte thoroughly entrancing, though; and she wants the entire world to know it, so Wales will be unable to avoid knowing it too. She writes to her brother, the czar, that the Princess Royal’s looks are ‘enticing and seductive’. Are these precisely the mots juste to describe a charming and very young lady? It occurs to several reasonably cognitive people, including Lady Ilchester, a new governess, that Katherine is promoting Charlotte’s virtues as a potential bride for one of Russia’s innumerable grand dukes. No matter how grand these dukes are, it is absolutely certain they won’t be grand enough for Charlotte’s father – and no one at all doubts this, not even the Grand Duchess Katherine.

                So beset is the Regent by, to put it mildly, problems, decisions and vast responsibilities that he even continues to invite that despised, egg-pated toady, the Duke of Kent, to assist him, and – it never rains but, in England at least, it always pours — to participate in the countless gala events Wales is allegedly planning to fill every waking hour in every day that his stellar guests are blessed by heaven with for a whole month. Kent, as Edward now becomes to the Regent, is after all the only royal brother with a gift for organization – with a gift for anything useful at all, if we’re to be honest. York, Clarence, Ernest, Augustus, the ever-absent Adolphus, Octavius and the other dead baby, even Wales himself: Any gifts? Not really. No wonder they resent and hate Edward. 

           The first of these megalopolitan jumbo galas is, believe it or not, a celebration of Louis XVIII’s return to his throne. You wonder, as you might well do, how Louis squeezed himself back into this picture. Much of the surviving French royal family have been living very quietly and extremely inexpensively at Hartwell, in Buckinghamshire, since the Corsican usurper made most European states no longer the safe havens they’d been after the Revolution – which even back then wasn’t very safe. These exiled Bourbons are soon to pass through London on their triumphal return journey home. It was understandably assumed that they’d stay a few days in our storied capital, enjoying the Regent’s fabled hospitality, including the usual grand honorary banquet, before heading off to war-torn Paris, which is now nothing like the place they remember. But unpredictability even afflicts assumptions made about a future the French royals are trundling towards.

                Along with Augie, Duke of Sussex, Kent is asked to escort the new French King and old Comte de Provence to his waiting ship at Dover – which, as anyone in the navy will know, is in fact a yacht, not a ship. First, however – and this is an event in which the pudgy hand of Wales is impossible to miss – the brothers have to assist their Regent during a ceremony of notary antiquity to induct Louis into the Noble Order of the Garter – our highest accolade. Edward, when he was still a mere prince, had received this honour before accomplishing anything at all – except an impressive debt — as had his brothers, who would never accomplish anything at all. And this cavalier doling-out of our highest honour, Kent now believes, surely lowers the height of that highest honour, and devalues the accolade as an honour to anyone else. It ought to cease; but no one is about to hand the highest honour back to restore its former height;  so it remains a dubious honour that no Englishman really wants, values or gets. We need, thinks Kent, a new highest honour that is truly difficult to obtain and thus genuinely valued. You might say that he has mixed feelings about the amount of time he will have to spend, waste really, handing out something not worth having to some creaking old restored monarch who probably couldn’t care less about receiving it. There are a few garter knights still staggering around in their eighties or nineties who did something no one is old enough to remember now that merited the honour. How do they feel about tottering about in medieval regalia with teenaged garter knights who aren’t old enough to have done anything meritorious? Kent has no idea, since he’s never attended a garter event in his life and has sometimes even forgotten he is a knight. Wales had to remind him of this, and now he knows why. 

              The induction of Louis is to take place in St. James’ Palace’s Presence Chamber, a place that still makes Edward clutch his seat in dread, even though its Minotaur is now barely a substantial ghost, and locked away in his mad cell by the rivers of Babylon, or Hanover. The Garter ceremony usually occurs in the Windsor Throne Room,- with services held prior to it in St. George’s Chapel. Windsor is not on King Louis’ route, however, so Wales has had to reorganize everything to suit his honoured guest’s itinerary. As Kent told the Regent, Windsor would only add twenty minutes at the most to Louis’ bloody route, so this massive inconvenience is just the usual French arrogance and obstreperousness. 

‘He’s the king of France, for Christ’s sake,’ Wales had said. ‘I can’t tell him to fuck off and get his damn honour where he was told to get it, can I?’

‘Why not?’ Kent asked him. ‘Did they change their route to Boston when Papa told them to keep out of the American war? Louis’ lucky we don’t hand him a bill for his decade of holiday here sponging on us. He didn’t even pay for his time at the spa in Bath.”

‘How the hell would you know that, Kent?’

‘Because I had to pay for it?’

‘God, why?’

‘Ask Captain Smollett..’

‘Who?’

             Hundreds of their conversations sound much like this one in their speciousness and inanity.

               Edward arrives at the venerable palace, on time of course, and in his own garter regalia. This, you may not know, and might not believe, consists of a heavy ermine-trimmed cloak, a velvet Tudor bonnet sprouting ostrich and heron feathers, a silk doublet and stockings, and shoes of a style unfashionable even two hundred years ago, so it’s little wonder the setting and his costume give the impression that it’s still the 13^th century. But King Louis is late, very late, and the Regent paces up and down irritably, looking even more ridiculous than the Duke of Kent. How much longer can this nod to the distant past go on? Edward wonders. When will the august nature of its rigmarole and outfits become risible, or even more risible than it is now?

            “Lord,” says Wales, as Kent enters the dark wood-panelled room, “you look preposterous, a fucking huge jester…’

              “Quips and quiddities notwithstanding,’ says Kent, who mysteriously reverts to being Edward again, and decides against other retorts. Instead he says, ‘There must surely come a time when these antiquated costumes are abandoned, mustn’t there?”

           “Tradition,” says Wales, as if expecting the question. “Meddling with tradition is like… je ne sais quoi…” You wonder if he’s drunk before noon. He probably wonders too.

             Wales perhaps should have said that Charles I had altered the Garter costume a little, and look what happened to his nobly feathered head! But Wales prefers to know nothing of history – unless it’s his own biography — and in fact the head of King Charles I is now one of his many possessions; he currently has it in a box. The coffin of King Charles had been discovered during recent renovations to St. George’s Chapel at Windsor and, naturally enough, Wales requested that the severed head found inside it be delivered to him in a bag. He then had a section of spine removed so he could show his sisters incision marks made in the bone by an axe. But when the moment of revelation arrived, unsurprisingly, his sisters had no desire to see Charles I’s head. 

           “Fuck the French!” Wales now grumbles. “They’re always late. Is it another fucking fad or fashion with them?”

            “I’m not aware of its being so,” says Edward tactfully.

             “Bah! Well, I suppose they’ve had a rough time of it, haven’t they?’ A pause, as he thinks he hears the Regent-hating mob jeering nearby. It proves to be a portly yellow cat purring under a bookshelf nearby, so he continues: ‘What was I saying? Hmm. Yes. Frenchies. They haven’t done well with rulers for about six hundred years now, have they? Then the Corsican usurper, and now this crapulous old bugger. God almighty! What’s the matter with ‘em? I mean, we’ve chopped off a regal head, bur you’ve got to draw the line somewhere, haven’t you? Yes. I’ve got that stubborn old Stewart’s head in a bag somewhere. Chop!’ A pause, as past and present reunite, and then he rambles on: ‘What really, really infuriates me,” he confides, “is this fucking czar claiming the victory all for himself. Not to mention that intolerable bitch of a sister costing me a fortune for the privilege of tolerating her fucking insults and incessant interference. Don’t I deserve some credit for saving Europe from the Corsican fucking Ogre?”

                 Edward thinks of many things he could say to this, but why bother? 

               ‘How long does it take you to think of a response, Eddie?’ Wales snaps, tapping a foot frenetically on the ancient boards. ‘I’ve been waiting so long I’ve forgotten what the bloody question was. Fuck the French!’ 

              Of course, Edward now agrees that it is an outrageous act of hubris on Alexander’s part.

              ‘Who? I’m talking about that scabrous old toad, Louis the Umpteenth – how many fucking Louis’ do they need? – not that pompous Russian prick…’’

             Edward wants to ask how many Georges we’re planning to have; but at this point — you might say mercifully — the door flies open and an equerry announces His Majesty, King Louis XVIII of France, along with the royal brother, Comte d’Artois, the aged Duchesse d’Engheim, and several other vinous old spongers from the inexpensive little Hartwell court. The former Comte de Provence looks plumper and less frayed at the edges than he had in the dingy baths at Bath; indeed, he may even be fatter than the Regent. But no, that’s not possible, is it? Louis recognizes the Duke of Kent, despite his own rheumy eyes and Edward’s unlikely garments, and he claims, with ridiculous insincerity, that he’s glad to see him again – which is not what the Regent wants to hear – no, not at all.

               “These are better circumstances,” Louis says unnecessarily, extending the ham of a hand, “but we told you the usurper would be gone, did we not?’ A pause to let his uncanny percipience sink in and impress everyone – which it doesn’t. So, he proceeds on another omniscient tack: “This time tomorrow we shall be back on our throne…” He’s quickly adjusted to the royal plural, hasn’t he? Yet he now makes all the travel, crowds, speeches and unimaginably tedious ceremonies awaiting him sound rather wearying, rather irksome. When you’ve done nothing whatsoever in your life, anything seems too much. 

                Then the Regent voices his own concerns: “I trust you will not forget our humble role in all of this, Louis…’ Wales doesn’t do ‘humble’ very well.

              “As we told your dear brother back there in the overpriced mud at Bath,” says Louis, “our two nations shall forever be one family from now on. Only amity… and trade. No more war…” Some secretary back in Hartwell must have scripted this noble thought for him.

              ‘I thought we paid for your bathing at Bath?’ says Wales, trying to make it sound genial.

              ‘Oui,’ admits Louis — or was it “we”? — ‘but it was still overpriced. We wouldn’t have paid such an outrageous bill were we to be offered it…’

               ‘No doubt,’ Wales tells him, ‘but we value honour more than money…’

            ‘That, brother, is not what we hear,’ says Louis.

            How long before Wales bundles him into a sack and kicks him down Duke Street, and on into the Thames? From the looks on their faces, you can tell that Edward and his brother do not find Louis’ ‘family’ analogy as apt or conducive as France’s new monarch evidently does. The trade in familial amity amongst Hanovers is not exactly thriving.

            “That’s also my dearest wish,” lies Wales. “If any good can come out of all the bloodshed and strife, it’ll be that sort of thing – the amity, I mean – and that alone, won’t it?” He seems to have forgotten what he’s banging on about, but you’re still inclined to believe he’s sincere in whatever it was. Yet the idea of peace with France is too much of a novelty in our history for this to be the case on any other day than this one. We don’t trust the French; and you can’t like a people you don’t trust.

               “I agree, dear brother,” Louis says – though no one can remember now what he’s agreeing to — kissing the Regent on both cheeks twice, an action Wales obviously detests, immediately wiping his florid face with a lace kerchief.

               The ceremony of investiture now begins, with the Regent reading from behind a monstrous oak lectern its archaic phrases of obscure obligations and incomprehensible honours. But he must have mixed up the sheets of this document, since an effusive paragraph of greeting is followed by a list of arcane privileges which the inductee will be accorded; and a declaration that the coveted star and insignia will forthwith be presented comes before cautionary tales of Garter Knights who betrayed their companions, suffering dreadful punishments as a consequence, such punishments now described in unnecessarily vivid detail.

            Christ, thinks Edward, what malicious medieval goblin dreamt this up?

           “Enough of this,” the Regent scoffs, as if agreeing with Edward’s thought, tossing pages to the floor. “Let us get down to the honours. Bring the Garter Star and insignia!” he booms out to three distant men, who stand to one side, holding  tasselled velvet cushions upon which lie the various insignia required.

              These officials are known as the Garter King of Arms, Usher Black Rod, and the current Secretary of the Noble Order, who has no other lofty title. The Garter is traditionally affixed first to the new Companion’s left calf; and the Regent now groans as he bends his crackling knees to reach Louis’ ankle. Only a sovereign or a Prince of Wales can perform this task, but they’re traditionally assisted in it by two other companions of the Noble Order. Since Edward is the only other companion present – where the hell is Sussex? — he crouches, ready to assist. In an unexpectedly deft move, however, Louis snatches up the blue garter, with its gold lettering, and examines it intently.

             “Honi soi qui mal y pense,” he reads. “This is the old French! Why should an English honour still have an old French motto? We’ve never been told of this order’s origins, have we? You ought to explain these things beforehand, before you pass them out. People should know; we should know…’ You’d think he was being insulted rather than inducted.

              The Regent looks mortified. Edward gathers from his expression that Wales has no idea how the Noble Order originated. Fortunately, he knows; indeed, Edward knows several different versions of the origin, one of which he immediately rules out, since it involves those ancient English claims to the French throne.

               “It goes all the way back to the twelfth century, Majesty,” he informs Louis, who does seem genuinely interested. “The Countess of Salisbury was dancing at a ball in Calais thrown by the French king…” He finds the fact that he knows this depressingly reprehensible. Knowledge should be more selective. 

               “We know Salisbury,” Louis barks, as if this will amaze everyone. “Circle of great big stones built there by giants,’ he wants us to believe. ‘But we have much better examples of this in France…”

              “No doubt you do,” says Edward, continuing. “Well, it seems that, while she was dancing, the Countess’s garter slipped off onto the floor, which made all the knights present snigger; which shamed and infuriated the King, who gallantly retrieved the garter himself, holding it up and saying, Honi soi qui mal y pense, before handing it back to the Countess…” What are we with all this rigmarole, he thinks, children? By contrast, his masonic rituals have gravitas and depth to them.

               “The meaning is ‘Shame be upon anyone who thinks badly of this’,” says Louis, presumably proud to find our highest honour is so very French. “But did he not put the lady’s garter back on himself?”

              “I thought it meant ‘Evil to him who thinks evil’,” grumbles the Regent, prodding the air with his forefinger.

              “We’re not told what happened after this point,” Edward admits.

             “Incroyable,’ says Louis in falsetto amazement. ‘And your highest honour is based on such an idiotic yarn!” he cries, laughing or coughing – it’s not clear which. “A real French king would have replaced her garter personally… and high up on the lady’s thigh too…” He makes an odd clucking sound, which has his retinue cackling away in their corner. The old Duchesse d’Engheim titters and then sneezes violently, doubling over from the recoil.

                 The Regent now snatches the Garter back, struggling with laboured breath and creaking bones to attach it around Louis’ left calf. “Let’s get the bloody thing on!” he growls sotto voce at his brother. “For Christ’s sake, Eddie, you’re supposed to assist me…”

              “I am assisting,” Edward whispers back, nearer than Wales thinks he is, “but I can’t help it if his calf is an inch too wide for the damned thing to go around, can I?”

              “Move it up a bit,” Wales hisses. “I don’t care whether he has to wear it around his prick. Whew!” He straightens up for a few seconds, simply in order to breathe.

              Eventually they find a spot just below Louis’ knee where, the two of them pulling with both hands, they manage to fasten the garter’s hooks.

              “We shall soon have no blood flowing to our leg,” Louis complains, tentatively bending the leg in question. “Is it supposed to impede ambulation?”

              “Yes, it is,” says the Regent, impatient now, rising from his knees, wheezing, sweating, his face an ulcerous scarlet. “It keeps you in step with your brother companions. Give me the riband,” he now orders Usher Black Rod, who hands him the gold chain. “I said ‘riband’ not ‘chain’,” Wales splutters, quite out of sorts.

              Usher Black Rod discreetly shakes his head, so the Regent hangs the chain around Louis’ neck.

              “My God!” groans the new King of France. “How much gold is in this thing?” You’d think it was a slab of granite he had to wear on his head.

               “Thirty ounces, I believe,” says Edward, distressed that he knows even this, but still wanting to add that the weight could be drastically reduced if Louis wishes.

             The Garter King of Arms now hands the Regent the blue riband, which he then drapes over Louis’ left shoulder — after checking which shoulder Edward’s sash is on. Lastly, the Noble Order’s secretary passes him the Garter Star, which is a cross of St. George set within an eight-pointed star. Normally, such stars are made of silver, or even just enamelled tin. If you want a diamond-and-saphire-encrusted one like Edward’s or the Regent’s, you have to pay for it yourself – or with Haligonian money. We’re more generous with foreign monarchs, though. What Wales pins over King Louis’ heart – after an exploratory attempt which nearly pins it through his heart – is a star of platinum studded with 150 diamonds, surrounding a core of white gold in which the St. George cross is set with 50 rubies. The motto is emblazoned in reddish gold.

              “Very pretty,” Louis remarks, like a man who has chests full of such gewgaws – which he probably will have by this time tomorrow.

              “Now the collar and hat?” the Regent hastily asks his garter officials, who now hold three empty cushions.

             “Oh no, we’re not going to wear a perfectly preposterous hat like you two, no,” says Louis firmly, again flexing his gartered leg. “The star is very nice, but we think we’ve had quite enough symbolism for one day. And,” he points down, “this thing has to come off before our gout erupts in protest…”

              “You take it off,” the Regent tells the Comte d’Artois grumpily. “My job is only attaching the damned thing…”

              Kneeling, the comte, Louis’ brother, goes to work, soon summoning help. It still takes ten minutes before two of them can detach the garter, and then offer it to Louis, who waves it away, telling d’Artois to store it safely somewhere. “Now we must be on our way,” Louis says, “with many regrets and much gratitude. Ah-ah!” he sighs, trying out the freed leg. “What joy it is to feel our toes again…”

                “But the ceremonial banquet awaits us upstairs,” protests the Regent. “It’s a key part of the tradition…”

              “But the tradition is so very silly,” Louis tells him good-naturedly. “Christmas and Easter, we understand…But some foolish woman losing her garter…Please, please do not ask us to respect anything so absurd. In France there is the Order of St. Louis, commemorating a saint, not a garter. We have not seen our homeland for a quarter-century – surely you can understand that we’re eager to see her… and take our rightful place on her throne?”

               “Perfectly understandable,” admits the Regent sincerely. “Shall I have some food and wine packed for your journey?”

               “We have all we need,” says Louis, “except the road beneath our wheels…”

               Yes, the brothers think simultaneously. The road. The Regent pulls Edward aside and mutters under his breath, “Delay these bastards here as long as you’re able to, so I can take a regiment ahead and make sure every town and village has a proper farewell, a hearty bon voyage ready for when this old bugger passes through. Do not fail me in this. I need fifteen minutes’ start at least.” You wonder at this friendly concern: it seems genuine – but what does he want from it?

                 “You’re riding a horse!” says Edward, the thought impossible.

               “Hardly, Eddie. The last one died beneath me. My carriage is here. Now just do what I asked you to do, eh?” He always has a way of implying you’ll fail at whatever he’s asked of you.

               “I’ll do whatever I can, but I can’t imprison them, can I?”

               ‘Why not?’

               Eighteen minutes later, when the Duke of Sussex has finally shown up, Edward says, “Come, let’s escort our French guests from this green and pleasant land…”  He’s looking forward to fresh air, as he often is these days. His lungs are no longer what they used to be – but what is?

           Then Augie and he lead a troop of horse through the city,  ahead of King Louis’ cortege of six carriages across the river, and out onto the Dover road.

              In every town and village through which they all pass, wild cheering and applause greet Louis, banners bless his restoration, and nearly everyone wears the white Bourbon cockade in their cap or hat. The Regent has done his work exceedingly well; he has a talent for arranging celebrations, and thoroughly enjoys the work – when there’s not so much of it. 

                 At Dover the scene is even more magnificent. Wales has planned a splendid military farewell, and now, belted into into his impressively upholstered and fortified field-farshal’s uniform, he stands before a regimental band on the quayside. Unfortunately, however, Louis dashes on board the royal yacht, which is swathed in Coalition flags, and disappears down into his cabin before the Regent’s men can even strike up a march, less still fire off honourific rifle volleys and cannonades. 

                “Thank Jesus Papa didn’t have to see this,” says Wales, as the yacht weighs anchor. “He wanted every Bourbon dangling from a gibbet, not laden down with honours and cheered by English crowds. He never forgave them for America – now they’re Knights of the Garter…Christ! It’s….”  But whatever it is vanishes into unexpected emotion. A huge tear appears and rolls slowly down the pink acreage of his cheek.

             ‘I was thinking the same thing,’ says Edward, as always amazed at his eldest brother’s dramatic shifts of sentiment.

                The French tribute has, alas, been noticeable enough for the pseudonymous ‘Peter Pindar’ to compose one of his wretched satirical verses in the press, one guaranteed to further torment the already over-tormented Regent:

              In France’s hope and Britain’s heir

            Were i’ truth a most congenial pair:

              Two round, tun-bellied, thriving rakes,

          Like oxen fed on linseed cakes…

      Reading it, Edward wonders if oxen are in fact fed on linseed cakes, wonders it to avoid wondering what sort of day awaits him at Carlton House.

Queen Victoria’s Secret: Chapter 15.9

-xx-

                To his vast surprise, Julie and he are invited to a dinner at Carlton House in honour of the Grand Duchess Katherine of Oldenburg, sister to Czar Alexander. She’s visiting England for reasons best known to herself and has for three months commandeered the whole of Pulteney’s Hotel in Piccadilly. The Regent greets his towering little brother genially, as if there’s never been a harsh word between them — although Edward is now too wary of him to accord this genialty much significance. All he wants to say is: Look at this man! But everyone looks anyway. You can’t avoid it, the way you can’t avoid looking at the sun rising or a shooting star etching its line of light down the walls of a black heaven. 

               Wales has an artful new uniform, one which contrives to make him appear great of stature rather than just extremely corpulent. The shoulders are extended a foot on either side of his neck by large epaulette boards; various luminous honours of an inordinate size distract your gaze from his visible bulk; a thick belt has been drawn in so tightly, probably by pulleys and a dozen straining footmen, that he actually seems to have a waist, or an equatorial zone; there are trousers that conceal legs the size of barrels better than breeches did; a voluminous black cravat hides most of his cascading chins; and a rippling auburn wig of equine glossiness makes him look ten years younger. Well, perhaps five. But you have to credit the ingenuity entailed, the organization, and the strength of fabrics able to withstand the massive pressures and tectonic shifts of a body always busy, always in a state of complex rearrangements to accommodate the shipments of supplies, fuels, medicaments and sundry comestibles to be hauled into its various chambers, tubes, valves and filtering systems hourly, as they’re processed, used up and and then ejected, all of it to keep the mighty soft machine running and sufficiently energized to move about too – within reason, of couurse. Wales would be better suited as a minor planet or moon, a dazzling body of brilliant colours floating across the night sky several million leagues away from earth. At this range his gravitational field threatens to crush you.

              “I’m inviting all the Coalition leaders to London for a grand celebration of the victory,” the Regent confides, his boots creaking as he stands swaying gently in a corner of the drawing room. There’s a gilded rosette on the wall behind his head that resembles a nimbus. “But,’ he goes on, ‘Alexander’s sister has shown up early. God knows why; but her hotel’s costing me over two hundred guineas a week. I think she’s looking me over as a prospective husband,’ he says, almost bashfully. ‘Her own died a while ago. If I could only get rid of that Brunswick bitch …” He pauses, calling for brandy, more fuel; and then he continues, “What a match, eh? England and Russia! Oh! There she is now, Eddie. Come…”

                   He tows Edward by the arm over to a small woman in her late twenties, dressed entirely in black silk, with even blacker lace up to her neck, and a half-veil which fails to hide a rather beautiful, somewhat asiatic face, severe yet beguiling, and ringed by dense black curls. She’s gracious in a distant way as they’re introduced, but she then pays the Regent almost no attention at all, asking Edward about the West Indies.

              ‘One hears so much about your heroism,’ she says, as he cringes, and you can feel the Regent heating up like a bread oven.

              At dinner – the usual outrageously excessive affair – the Grand Duchess is seated to the Regent’s right, with the Duke of York to his left. He, the Duke of Kent, is wedged between Lady Conyngham, Wales’ latest mistress this week, and the stone-deaf Duchess of Leith; but he’s still close enough to hear, above the din of a hundred glittering guests, much of the conversation between Grand Duchess and Regent. It’s not going at all well either, despite Wales laying on all his considerable charm with a trowel and ignoring every other guest in the process. York is obliged to listen to what sounds like a sermon from the Bishop of Westminster, nodding and yawning a great deal. Did Wales seat him there deliberately? Are they at odds? Where’s Cumberland? The answer to all these questions is Wales’ great addiction to making people ill-at-ease. The closer you are to him, the more uneasy he wants you feel, like the moons of Jupiter.

               As soup is served, at a snap of the Regent’s thick fingers a group of musicians starts to play somewhere behind the head table.

“Yech!” croaks Grand Duchess Katherine. “I hate music! It gives me nausea. Make it stop!”

             Wales hollers at the musicians to cease and get out of his sight. This they do, traipsing away with their instruments, looking very puzzled and dejected. 

            “Your husband has been dead for a long time now,” Wales tells her most indelicately, “so why should a woman as young and beautiful as yourself still cover her charms with such deep mourning?”

               Katherine throws him a look of unconcealed disgust, but she doesn’t reply at all.

             “For the life of me,” says Lady Conyngham, a presentable yet unattractive woman in her forties, wearing too many jewels and too revealing a dress, “what he sees in that ugly witch confounds me…”

                Edward tells her, “I imagine he sees a sister of the Russian czar, ma’am…”

              ‘Pah! She could be Macbeth’s weird sister…’

               He wants to correct her on this relationship, and almost does. But he’s more interested in eavesdropping than in her opinions. From what he can make out, the czar’s sister is trying very hard to antagonize the Regent – and with no small degree of success, since Wales is hitting the brandy rather harder and earlier than usual, throwing it down, guzzling and gulping. Look at him! His face is on fire! This won’t end well, like Macbeth, he thinks.

              “Where is your daughter, the Princess Royal?” Katherine now asks Wales bluntly, shunting food around her plate as if trying to make it go away. “She should be here. Why is she not?”

               “She stays at her own residence,” Wales tells her, his huge red cheeks glistening. “She’s too young to go out into the great world yet…”

                Katherine looks as if she doesn’t consider this world, his world, to be at all great, greatly bloated maybe, saying, “But she’s not too young for you to have fixed her a husband, is it not so? I believe she has just turned eighteen, has she not? That’s old enough to enjoy a little freedom and amusement, I’d say…”

              Anyone else would have been kicked out the window down Pall Mall and into the Thames for prying into his personal affairs, but to Katherine  the Regent simply says, “When she is married she’ll do what her husband wishes; until then she does what I wish…”

             “I should like to meet her.”

             “I’m sure that can be arranged, Madame…”

            And then the Grand Duchess Katherine wanders her way into truly forbidden territory, saying, “I should also like to visit your queen, Caroline – or is she still Princess of Wales? Your English titles are most annoying. I find it also most strange that she too is not present. Is there a reason for it, or a custom behind it? Anyway, I must meet her…”

               Christ! he thinks. We’ll be at war with Russia by the morning. Who the hell coached her in dinner conversation guaranteed to enrage your host? Wales is steaming, melting into his jacket, his great belt about to burst apart and bat his guests out into the park. “That will be quite impossible,” Wales tells Katherine in a voice upon which gobbets of reason float like grease in soup. “We’ve been estranged for many years now – indeed, I’m currently seeking a divorce…” Currently for twenty years.

               “I shall visit her anyway,” Katherine says, she the Grand Duchess, deploying the kind of finality that comes from years, a life of having your wishes granted unquestioningly. “Please arrange my visit,” she adds, as if talking to her maid.

               The Regent has travelled into the uncharted territory speculated to exist somewhere beyond apoplectic fury, but never confirmed. He looks imploringly over at Count Leven, the Russian Ambassador, who sits opposite Edward. Almost imperceptibly, Leven returns the look with a tilt of his chin. A faint tutting of disapproval comes from his wife, Princess Leven, who’s seated a few chairs down, and known to loathe the Grand Duchess Katherine of Oldenburg, and loathe her with that especially caustic kind of loathing only women seem able to manage for one another. Men of course are dead long before reaching such a stage in their relationships, and dead not from natural causes.

                “Eh?” says the Duchess of Leith, looking at Edward with eyes so pale and grey they resemble gobs of fat set into the desert of rouge that is her mask.

                “I said nothing, ma’am,” he tells her.

               “Iced pudding?” says the old duchess, in a rattling phlegmy voice “That will come after the main courses. Are you not familiar with our customs over there in Rustshire?”

              “She’s deaf as a stone,” Lady Conyngham informs him, as if this isn’t woefully apparent. “Georgie’s looking very upset, wouldn’t you say?” she goes on, sounding deeply satisfied now.

              “Too much brandy,” Edward suggests, hoping she’ll shut up so he can overhear more of the Regent’s predicament.

             But Lady Conyngham is drinking heavily too, and she won’t shut up; she will talk. Now he must also keep shouting at the Duchess of Leith, who mishears every word said to her by anyone — not that many are ever said to her.

              “Can you stop shouting, Eddie,” shouts the Regent at one point, clearly trying to find a whipping-boy before his barely-repressed fury is expelled from its theoretical containment.

              By signs, Edward indicates that Leith’s duchess is deaf. Wales is about to suggest something characteristically dreadful – like having the old lady dragged from table and kicked down the stairs — when Katherine interrupts him: “Poor old voman,” she says. “Are you not a ruler here? Can you not be courteous and find her an ear trumpet?”

               Wales fires off a canine volley at a footman, whose maker will be met if he doesn’t find immediately such a device. The man obviously has no idea what an ear-trumpet is; but, like every other servitor here, he knows better than to ask his master for clarification at such a time – at any time. Eventually, one is in fact found, and the Duchess of Leith presses it to her ear with the cone so close to Edward’s head he is forced to lean sideways for the rest of dinner. He wishes for an ear-trumpet of his own so he could listen in on the Regent more easily. Instead, he must listen to Lady Conyngham’s prattle about the vicissitudes of her life, the travails she endures, the simply ghastly people she encounters. At one point, Princess Leven rolls her eyes at him – whether at the dinner in general, the Grand Duchess Katherine, or at Lady Conyngham’s crapulous babble, he can’t tell. But an ally is always welcome, if only for an hour. Time passes drearily; and then the Regent’s conversation gets noticeably louder. 

             “If you ask me,” says Katherine, waving a hand at the world, “everyone in this ridiculous country of yours is mad!”

              “This is intolerable!” Wales hisses at Count Leven, who now sits as pale and still as a plaster statue. For him this is business not pleasure, of course, and the business is faring terribly. 

                The ball following this excruciating banquet promises to be even more disastrous, since Katherine refuses to dance with the Regent, or indeed with anyone else prsent, citing her widow’s weeds as a reason so indisputatious that no one will raise so much as an eyebrow at it . Edward stands with Augie watching Wales and his mistress rotate around the room like a planetary system: the thick rotundity of Earth and the Moon’s pale sliver.

             ‘Someone’s going to pay for Georgie’s ruined evening,’ says Augie. ‘You know how he is – someone will pay…’

           ‘Yes,’ says the Duke of Kent, ‘and I have the awful presentiment it’ll be me…’

               ‘Why?’

               ‘Ah. Balance? He was nice to me earlier, so he’ll have to correct the balance, won’t he? I’m going to have one dance with Madame Julie, and then leave…’

               ‘Me too…’

              ‘Hmm. Why don’t you have a woman, Augie?’

               ‘They don’t like me…’

               ‘I see a difficulty there,’ he says, hoping it’s not one of the more difficult difficulties.

              ‘You don’t even want to know what I see, Ed,’ says Augie, scrunching up his mouth as if ringing out waterlogged lips.

               ‘You’re right: I don’t want to hear it.’ Perhaps, he thinks, no one should hear these difficult things that so lower the spirit you become a difficulty yourself? Maybe we should all hear nothing? There are monasteries for silent orders, where 200-odd monks don’t say a word to one another, except at Christmas – which itself probably becomes that year’s greatest difficulty every year. Whenever I’m near those unnatural brothers, he tells himself, I always feel crushed, ground down to a nub. Away from them it’s gone, the spirit elevates again. You cannot ignore these observations. A physical sickness can be transmitted to others by mere proximity – why not the metaphysical maladies that cause a soul to sicken, even to die? What you eat makes you what you are, which makes you who you are too; could who you’re with have similar effects on the mind? He thinks of the crabbed and misaligned circles that congregate around Wales and York, cautiously convinced that his theory is correct.

                 This conviction grows firmer and takes root as he hears Wales call out something truly vile clear as a cracked bell a hundred yards away across the mirrored sheen of parquet, followed by, ‘Hicket! Hick-ult!’ A juddering, pulverising bout of solidly industrial hiccups intervenes in what was about to be a horrid exchange between brethren. 

                Two more voices vie for his attention now, as Augie says, ‘What’s that bloated clown want now, eh? Pillory you, is he? Tell Umpty-Grumpy t’go fuck hisself – if he can reach, yah?’ There ensues a first-formers’ giggling jag that itself may well be one reason why women find the Duke of Sussex’s magnetism pulling them in the other direction, as if his poles have been reversed.

                Almost simultaneously, from a few feet behind him, Julie whispers a slurred complaint about Walers’ mauling of her, saying she wants to go home: ‘Now, Wedward!’

              Oh dear. By now he’s turned to her, agog with shame and fury, badly wanting to rush at his eldest brother and end the warped regency with a pair of coal tongs smashing through his skull and squeezing that diseased brain to death. But the contact-transmission theory gives him pause. So, he uses his arm as a yoke on Julie’s shoulders to make her trot briskly out from this glittering hell-hall and straight over to their carriage in the mews.

‘Whass ‘er name?’ says Julie, demanding incoherent knowledge of Wales’ new mistress, as they rattle and grind south along the King’s Road. 

‘You’re drunk,’ he says, not reprimandingly, just a simple declaration. Julie may have been tipsy once or twice during their years together, but never drunk. ‘You mean Lady Conyngham?’

She bridles. ‘Dwunk?’ she says incredulously, throwing back her head in an exaggerated manner and uttering one of those exaggerated hound-like laughs that are a one-syllable bark. ‘Hargh!’ Why is it that the inebriated never believe they’re drunk?

               But he is no longer listening, no longer caring about the enormities that are quotidian in Carlton House. You walk into a lion’s day and taste his food, then you deserve to become his food, don’t you? It isn’t his fault – it’s yours, for knowing better and then acting worse. Approaching Putney Bridge on the towpath road, he looks out at hundreds of flickering yellow lights, some big as a bouquet, most smaller than candle flames. They mark the spots where those whose lives are supported by the slow brown river live and work. Here in his makeshift little bivuac the snail-gatherer, who sells his molluscs as food to those who can afford no other kind of meat; there a family of pure-finders,who collect dogshit for the tanneries – although no one seems to know why they want it – a dozen or so mudlarks live over there in a box-like shack barely roomy enough for Edward’s Napoleon collection, spending their days scouring the boggy river shores at low tide for whatever’s hidden under slime, sand and silt – not much you’d think, but their “much: is not yours. Under a blackened rag stetched from one bridge strut to another, he sees, their filthy faces ghastly in firelight, a band of toshers, whose trade is searching London’s labyrinthine sewers for scrap metal and anything else of value that has ended up in those tidal brooks of human waste that never ebb, constantly fed by a city growing larger by the day, as migrants from the length and breadth of our island, and the four distant corners of our empire are drawn to this city by the legends they’ve heard of its fantastic horde of riches, its solid gold streets, jewelled pavements, and the staggering sums paid out in wages to even the bootblack or sweeper, who are all dressed like sultans in silks and satin, their work like play. You wonder what they make of the reality when they’re in it. You could ask them, for some are here, roasting roots and acorns over charcoal in the dripping damp of Thameside, their fear of a future all that makes the present bearable.

This, he thinks, is the greatest city on earth. There ought to be a question mark after his thought, but it cannot bear any more weight.

-xxi-

                There’s a Congress now at Vienna to deal with the multitudinous problems created by France since 1793, by the revolutionary wars, the Napoleonic wars, and the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire. It’s quite an endeavour to sort all of this out. Entire nations have been dislocated; states have changed hands several times; frontiers need to be renegotiated. It’s a reorganization of the world – our world, the world England all but owns, now that Europe is a charity-case. Few are bothered by the squabble in North America, that new world so far away. The Yankees are still coming over the border like feral pigs, stealing whatever they can, destroying whatever they don’t want – until we catch them and shoot. We win some, we lose some. But it’s poor stuff, the war – if you can call it that in all honesty. Our only real concern is with England, which should be starting to prosper like never before, starting to body out and swagger around the great globe, just like the Prince Regent at his ball. Wales is the empire materialized, anthropomorphised. If there’s too much of him, you now know why. We sometimes ask ourselves how much is enough, and the answer is usually too much.

                However, the Regent’s hopes of marrying the czar’s sister are not the only ones crushed under his boots over coming weeks. Though eagerly awaited, prosperity is rather slow in coming – not that we broadcast this to our millions and millions of subjects, huddled in their huts and lean-tos, slouching through their jungles and paddies, dreaming of that celestial city on the Thames we make sure they hear all about, even though it doesn’t exist, or not as we describe it. 

              But let’s not be too harsh, for the place is not without its charms. Even Edward enjoys the vibrancy of a city where much of life is lived out in the open by a bewilderingly diverse society, people from everywhere and anywhere, who may be grindingly poor but survive through grit and ingenuity, plying their innumerable trades with a pride the rich may find misplaced, but the workers of this world understand completely. As he rides alone through World’s End, heading for Chelsea and then north to Mayfair, Edward understands it too. Not many years hence, another member of that blue apex, Mr. Mayhew, will understand and revel in it completely as well. If we we wish to see our great city as they see it, there is no better guide than Mr. Mayhew, and we ought to let him paint us the picture.

              “The pavement and the road are crowded with purchasers and street-sellers. The housewife in her thick shawl, with the market-basket on her arm, walks slowly on, stopping now to look at the stall of caps, and now to cheapen a bunch of greens. Little boys, holding three or four onions in their hand, creep between the people, wriggling their way through every interstice, and asking for custom in whining tones, as if seeking charity. Then the tumult of the thousand different cries of the eager dealers, all shouting at the top of their voices, at one and the same time, is almost bewildering. “So-old again,” roars one. “Chestnuts all ‘ot, a penny a score,” bawls another. “An ‘aypenny a skin, blacking,” squeaks a boy. “Buy, buy, buy, buy, buy— bu-u-uy!” cries the butcher. “Half-quire of paper for a penny,” bellows the street stationer. “An ‘aypenny a lot ing-uns.” “Twopence a pound grapes.” “Three a penny, Yarmouth bloaters.” “Who‘ll buy a bonnet for fourpence?” “Pick ‘em out cheap here! three pair for a halfpenny, bootlaces.” “Now‘s your time! beautiful whelks, a penny a lot.” “Here‘s ha‘p‘orths,” shouts the perambulating confectioner. “Come and look at ‘em! Here‘s toasters!” bellows one with a Yarmouth bloater stuck on a toasting-fork. “Penny a lot, fine russets,” calls the apple woman: and so the Babel goes on.”

                  And so it does, so it does. Edward goes on too, but Mr. Mayhew stays behind, lost in the crowds, lost in time. Since Edward is lost in thought, and needs to be alone to do it, let us look elsewhere to see what is going on this bright and not really very damp morning in the capital of our empire, with those cries of vendors still bouncing of the bricks and tiles to be hurled away across green acres by an energetic little breeze that knows its business. 

                 Queen Charlotte plans to hold two drawing rooms for the European dignitaries during the coming month of their visit to celebrate the Ogre’s great fall and, if we’re honest, to gloat a little too. The Queen consults with her eldest son, who she will never refer to as a regent, on the issue of a guest list. It is a tricky issue, as are most issues if she’s involved with them. Her daughter Sophia, who was present at the time of this meeting, tells the Duke of Kent about it later, which is the only way we could have known anything about it. For Edward records what he was doing for every minute of every day, but he rarely records what anyone else was doing with their own millions of minutes.

               Their mother and Wales had realized, almost simultaneously it seems, that many of those dignitaries arriving in England for the great jamboree would be relatives of Princess Caroline – mostly nephews or cousins – and they will naturally expect the Princess of Wales to be present at the proposed drawing rooms, as well as at many other functions.

              “There’s no way I’m going to have that woman anywhere near me,” Wales had shrieked, stamping his feet, wanting to smash something – which he can’t decently be doing at Windsor; not that decency is ever very high on his list of concerns. But what to do about this unimagined enormity?

               After calming him with solemn reassurances, as she’s done since he weighed one stone not 41 and knew only one word to go with his weight, the Queen and he began to concoct between them a rather cowardly letter to Caroline, which reads: The Queen considers it to be her duty to lose no time in acquainting the Princess of Wales that she has received a communication from her son, the Prince Regent, in which he states that Her Majesty’s intention of holding two Drawing-Rooms, having been notified to the public, he must declare that his own presence at her court cannot be dispensed with, and he desires it to be his fixed and unalterable determination not to meet the Princess of Wales upon any occasion, either in public or in private. The Queen is thus placed under the painful necessity of intimating to the Princess of Wales the impossibility of Her Majesty receiving Her Royal Highness at her Drawing-Rooms… 

               Well, there you go. It’s signed Charlotte R., but pullulates with Wales’ signature pompous circumlocutions, and his love affair with mawkish euphemism. It’s also a grave mistake; for it provides the spark that ignites some sort of gunpowder that’s been accreting in Caroline’s whirling brain, probably for decades now. Back in favour as the public’s ‘poor Caroline’, she’s also not without support from some of the Whigs in Parliament. These include – much to his folly — Augie, Duke of Sussex, and the mercurial lawyer, Henry Brougham. And these men have now realized that a divorce between the Regent and Caroline is in fact highly undesirable. If he remarries amd manages to produce a male heir, as unlikely an eventuality as this certainly is, young Princess Charlotte’s chances of becoming the monarch will be threatened — and everyone, everyone, likes the Princess Royal, likes the idea of her as their queen. No one’s happy with the Regency, not that many thought they would be. You can’t rely on Wales; he’s too unpredictable, even for someone long known to be unpredictable, which you might ascribe to this unpredictability. But no one likes an absolute unpredictability. You never know what to expect, and you need always to know a little, or else everything’s unexpected and you might as well be living in Bedlam or on the moon. Also, Wales could die at any moment, leaving a right mess to clean up. But being so unpredictable even this prediction is specious. All that can ever happen is what you least expect to happen. You can’t live like this, yet we do, after a fashion we do. 

              Even the attempt to force a marriage between Charlotte and the Prince of Orange is now seen as the Regent’s intolerance of another sun rising over his world and rising not so very far behind his own. His desperation to obtain a sufficient blot of evidence on his wife to justify divorcing her, or so it’s thought, reveals a distinct intention in him to remarry. It’s also believed that the Duke of York wants Charlotte out of England so his own regency, if it happens, will be unfettered. The fact that York has thought of this, however, means it probably won’t happen. In spite all this gnashing unpredictability, though, we still expect Wales to die soon – and so does he. On his bad days. All his days look depressingly bad to us, but they clearly aren’t, for much of the time he seems convinced he’ll live at least until we’re all dead, if not longer. Of course, everyone thinks this at times, if not at most times, but not the way Wales thinks it. He makes you think he really believes it, which inclines you to believe it, even if he really doesn’t. It is Crackerbox Palace, and we know it; but you can get used to anything in this life and, no matter how frayed or antic, soon think it’s normal, can’t you?

             It’s widely believed, and doubtless true, that lawyers are Satan’s spawn; so it is no surprise that Henry Brougham is the man who, unravelling this portion of Fate’s short-term planning, thus urges Caroline to bombard her husband with letters reminding him of his obligations to her. These obligations are mainly the necessity of he and she appearing together in public. It may not seem much, but you have to be a lawyer to realize that everything and anything can be much if you want it to be so, and if you’re adept at torturing the noble Roman language into weeping submission on thousands of pages fraught with tautologies, caveats and circumlocutions that make suicide preferable to reading another barbarism or travesty of pig Latin, verbs everywhere in a sentence but where they should be, at the end. Holding a sheaf of such insults to the average reader of la language he once thought he’d mastered, Caroline, cites, as an example of this proposed and necessary togetherness, their daughter’s similarly proposed and necessary wedding. And then she mentions, of all things, her and Wales’ inevitable coronation as king and queen. If she could think of any more likely upcoming royal events, she would certainly have  mentioned those too. Women are not to be tampered with, because they are rarely what they seem to be. Terror prefers a gentle façade in order to make its true nature, when revealed, seem even more terrible – and her fury is a bubbling lake of sulphur, burning, toxic, and smelling indescribably awful too. But she does, presumably with satanic assistance from Brougham,, soon dream up something equally vexatious. As she’s done before, and with spectacularly pyrotechnic results, once again she shares much of the ensuing correspondence from Carlton House, in all its humiliating and toe-curling personal detail, with the press. Alas-alackaday.  Napoleon himself could never have struck at England’s heart so devastating a blow. Even if he’d tried, we had an army and a navy to deal with the Corsican usurper. To deal with Caroline’s maddening demands, there was only a pen and paper – and that worked out well, didn’t it?

               So it is that, when least he needs it, with the starry elites of all Europe arriving in droves daily, Wales finds the London papers, every one of them, wallowing in the swill their readers crave, now the war’s over, more than air, more than anything: royal scandal. The morning editions have been reprinted three times before noon. 

              This especial scandal, a consensus of booze-addled hacks agrees, had its inception when Wales failed to attend the Vauxhall Gardens victory celebrations, the binge he’d personally organized – and all because Caroline had announced her intention to attend the event. O, the pettiness of our Regent! With the publication of that specific vile letter, the one conceived and hatched by Wales and Queen Charlotte, the letter banning Caroline from the Queen’s drawing rooms, general support for her reaches a new zenith. And, as you might expect, scornful derision, cartloads of it, are dumped hourly on Carlton House, as the Regent plumbs new depths, seeking a nadir that may well not be there. Wales feels he might sink forever down through an infinite, black and sticky void. These voids are of course necessarily bottomless and, by definition, also empty. But his of course is full of echoing jeers, spittle, hurtling clods of mud, or worse, and the howling laughter of dolts and riff-raff who, in the lost light of bright day, used to be so insignificantly tiny that he couldn’t really see them at all. Now they’re even in his bedchamber, gobbing down over the curtains, big bare bums farting in his face, one even defecating on the lace pillow near his wincing face. He’s the one now becoming too small for them to see; but he’ll never be so small they’ll let him escape the stinking slimey hell they’ve brought along as tribute. Wales is no longer sure if his nightmares are staged during sleep or waking, or if there’s any difference between these states anymore. There’s certainly no rest anywhere. He can’t even summon up much wrath at the thought of Caroline dancing jigs of triumph down the road there in Bayswater. When York ventures to ask him how he’s doing on the adternoon of the longest day that ever dawned, he simply stares at his younger brother with eyes like crushed crab apples and says… well, he says nothing at all. With Wales, there is no worse sign than silence. York is not inclined to return to this sinister silence, not ever. 

               As if this situation were not sufficiently maddening and soul-destroying, the Grand Duchess Katherine of Oldenburg is still shrilly insisting on her visit to Caroline, who she insists on calling the Princess of Wales, no matter how many people advise her not to do it. Have arrangements been made? She asks this infuriating question two or three times a day, asks it of anyone who reads her screeds at Carlton House. Whoever does read them always conveys on the scroll sent back to her at Poltney’s Hotel the same answer: No, such arrangements haven’t been made; and Wales will not be badgered by her into making them. Her bill at Pultney’s Hotel is now thousands of guineas, and Wales has no intention of paying it, just as the Grand Duchess Katherine has no intention of paying it herself either, less still economizing a little until the debt is miraculously settled, or at least reduced. And how will this happen if neither party involved will settle it? Perchance her brother, Czar Alexander? He’s the only possibility; but some species of religious scruple prevents him from assuming the debts of others. It may be what the Hindoos call “karma”: you barge into someone else’s trouble, you find yourself barging out with whatever appalling burden they’d been carrying into this world now on your own bent shoulders and impossible to shake off. So, the czar, manly though he likes to think he is, is not your man in this debt case. Or perhaps in Russia brothers never pay sisters’ debts? All this pecuniary balderdash also streams through the Regent’s bursting head, as hiccuping minor-demon journalists crown it Oaf of England. Caroline, Katherine, Charlotte, Katherine’s hotel bill, Caroline’s letter, Katherine’s astonishing capacity for insult, Caroline’s boundless malice, marriages, cornonations, round and round it all goes, round and round. Can it get any worse? Yes, for we forget that every crowned head in Europe is now on the Prince Regent’s doorstep expecting a tirelessly obliging and generous host. Fuck, he thinks. Fuck. They mean me, little me – and I feel so very, very, very sick. Please make it all go away. And for Christ’s sake, will someone bring me a drink! He sits bolt upright, the sweat streaming down his face as if he’d been sleeping underwater. His pillow is like a sodden sponge. Panic. That’s what he feels – panic! 

Queen Victoria’s Secret: Chapter 15.8

-xviii-

               One night over a dinner with Louis-Philippe, Fred Weatherall, Will Villette, and Maria Fitzherbert, they all discuss the streak of irrational cruelty which seems to run in the royal family.

             “Many of us here have suffered from it,” says Maria, who chews solely behind the napery these days. “I hear poor Caroline has now been banned even from writing to her daughter…”

              “Yes. So have I,” Edward says. “Caroline ought to make this public — so the mob can storm Carlton House. I am so sick of this endless hell he builds for her…’ But he thinks about the vast imponderably awful hell Wales has been assiduously building for himself for the last quarter-century. No matter how he behaves, Wales is still his big brother. At times Edward despises himself for the love, the bond that cannot break.

                “Caroline’s decided to leave the country instead,’ says Maria. ‘She’s first taking a tour of Italy, and then going on to the eastern Mediterranean…” But her pronunciation suddenly becomes curious. “I dink id due to da Sapio fadily scandal, nussing nezzry de do only vid Charlotte. Soggy vut I teesh hiss boddering ee; I dry hixing tem…” She plunges her fingers into her mouth and rummages there, her frizzy curls bobbing. We get used to anything, don’t we?

                ‘I think I know what you mean,’ he tells her, unsure he knows it all, though.

              The Sappio business was hardly a scandal. Caroline had become fascinated with a family of itinerant Italian musicians. By all accounts they were rather bad musicians, but there was a handsome young singer, Chanticleer – his real name, evidently. She’d had these accomplished spongers living at Montague House, until one of the Regent’s spies reported suspicions of an affair. Wales ordered Caroline to get rid of the Sapios immediately; but she merely moved them into a cottage in Bayswater, not far from Connaught Place, whence, by coincidence, she was soon due to move herself. Willful as ever, she continued to have the musicians to dinner, at which events they were also the entertainment. She often accompanied them too, her voice and playing not much worse than theirs. Incensed by the relentless rumours of infamous behaviour drifting in from Blackheath, and now from Bayswater, the Regent  is overjoyed to hear of Caroline’s plans for a lengthy absence from England, instantly agreeing to grant her a substantial allowance to be absent, and to remain absent for as long as she wishes – if not longer. 

               “But Caroline suspects he’ll now surround her with spies,” Maria says, her teeth apparently tamed, “on the assumption that, so far from home, she’ll be less cautious in her amours, and, sooner or later, she’ll surely be witnessed in flagrante delicto — so he can finally get his divorce. It’s all he ever thinks about – in fact it’s all he’s ever thought about for nearly twenty years now…” The strain of a half a lifetime with Wales is now showing all over her strained face, in bluish pouches below the eyes, in networks of fine lines like engraved cobwebs, and in the general pull of gravity dragging down everything that used to be up. Smiles become grimaces, laughing eyes are weighed down by sorrow. Even her ears seem to have sagged.

              “You know, Maria,” he says, finding the beef unusually resistent to his knife, “I’ve never believed she has actual affairs; they’re just girlish romances, little enthusiasms — mostly all in her mind. She has this need to shock, but, in reality, it’s a need for attention… and for the affection she’s been denied    so long …”

             “One can hardly blame the lady for that,” says Louis-Philippe, also battling with his meat.

             “You may well be right,” says Maria. “But I think her preference is for women anyway – the men are just a façade to hide an inclination she knows is scandalous to the mob — unacceptable if she wishes to remain popular… which she does. The rumours were once rife, but now she’s quelled them with the kind of dalliance no one would deny her…”

              “This beef is truly unforgiveable,” Julie tells the table, requesting that her guests cease fighting with it. She orders footmen to clear the plates, asking one, “Tell Cook not to buy cows from the mortuary in future – if indeed it was a cow…”

              They fall to discussing the latest news from Europe, of which Louis-Philippe has much that is not public knowledge from his own formidably extensive sources in a country where, after all, he is still in line for the throne.

             “Is this thrashing at Leipzig going to be his ruin?” asks Weatherall.

             “The man is full of surprises,” replies the duc, “but one has to view him as the French people do.”

               “In what sense?” Villette inquires, leaning in closer, since his hearing is now deteriorating, along with much else.

              “There are really two senses,” Louis-Philippe tells Villette. “There are his achievements in public works: the many hundred miles of new roads, all of them lined most fetchingly with poplar trees; the new harbours, with imposing fortifications to protect them; the schools for all; the Civil Code, enshrining many rights fought and died for; the Louvre and its magnificent collection of art for public viewing; and the overwhelming grandeur of buildings and boulevards which have made Parisians proud of their imperial capital. Your Frenchman loves to feel proud, remember. Next, and nearly equal in significance, is Bonaparte’s management of his own legend, not just in his personal written accounts of campaigns and triumphs, but also in the many works of art – the bas-reliefs, sculptures, and paintings – which depict the ever-burgeoning magnificence of his reign, and his progress toward a mythic status. It was once the Roman emperors to whom he wished to be compared; but now, I hear, his egoism knows almost no bounds. He’s even reported to have said that the ‘love of glory is like the bridge Satan tried to build across Chaos to reach Paradise’ – and, remember, he altered his coronation oath to include ‘and bring glory to France’. His court painter, Davide, is allegedly embarrassed by being forced to make his portraits increasingly lack all resemblance to their rather plump and aging subject. They now look more like homages to legendary heroes riding equally legendary steeds. He had a sculpture of himself smashed because it gave his face a wicked mien, telling the artist he did not win victories with his fists but with his mind. I’m even told Bonaparte wrote a letter to his stepson, Eugene de Beauharnais, who’s viceroy for the infant king of Italy, instructing him to copy it out and send it to the Pope, as if it were written by Eugene himself. It stated that Bonaparte could now only be compared in stature with Cyrus and Alexander…”

             “Both ‘the Great’,” Edward observes. There is little he diesn’t know about Napoleon anymore.

              “Both also honoured by the Egyptian priesthood with their own divine temple cults,” the garrulous Louis-Philippe adds. “Does he imagine the Pope will sanctify him while he’s still alive?”

                “Is that why he was so keen to conquer Egypt?” asks Weatherall.

               “The Egyptian priesthood vanished nearly two millennia ago,” says Edward, “but his reasons for going there, like everything about him, seem twofold. On one hand, he wanted to cut off our trade routes with the east; but on the other hand, he took with him a legion of scholars and artists, nearly 200 of them, to make as complete a survey of the ancient remains and their civilization as possible. Remember too that what took Cyrus and Alexander to Egypt was a desire to learn the secret which allowed a civilization to survive almost unchanged for well over 2,000 years. No empire has ever survived for even a quarter of Egypt’s time. This was also, presumably, one of Napoleon’s goals, to discover what enabled them to sustain a changeless world for well over two housand years. What was the reason to disguise a scientific expedition as a military campaign? Only a few people have witnessed the depth of Napoleon’s knowledge of and interest in ancient Egypt, and all were astonished by it. He was more concerned with the artefacts brought back, and the progress of scholarship from his expedition, than he was with running France. He realized that Egyptian mathematics preceded Pythagoras by over twenty centuries, and that the Great Pyramid was no tomb. His military purposes were genuine enough, but it was the symbolism of Egypt which intrigued him more – he put sphinxes on the furniture, obelisks everywhere…”

                 “As always, duplicity,” says Louis- Philippe, holding his wine glass up to a candle and gazing into the ruby reflections thoughtfully, before continuing, “How do you know all this, Kent?”

                 “Through brother masons in Paris who were part of the scientific team in Egypt,” Edward replies. “Without violating any oath, I can tell you that masons have an intense interest in certain ancient structures, the Great Pyramid being one of the most interesting among them – along with Solomon’s Temple. We have long understood symbolic aspects of it, but until now we’ve lacked accurate scientific studies. Thanks to Napoleon, we now have them, and they so far exceed our wildest dreams in confirming the information in our own traditional writings. The excitement has initiated a constant flow of information from their lodges to our own. I mention it only to shed light on Napoleon’s hidden agenda, which is definitely there, but far from understood in any political context…”

                 “Hah,” says Louis-Philippe. “But he can no longer pretend to be upholding the ideals of the Revolution and republicanism by placing his awful relatives on the thrones of petty monarchies, can he? And now finding he cannot trust even them! Sacre bleu! He lives in more ostentatious splendour than any Bourbon ever did – I don’t doubt that many are wondering why they put up with his endless wars when they could restore the monarchy and live peacefully. Apparently, the coffers are so depleted that he had to counterfeit Russian rubles to finance the advance on Moscow. Where is ancient Egypt in all this, hmm?”

             “Is it true the allies have now crossed the Rhine and are advancing on Paris ?” inquires Villette, cocking his head to hear the answer.

              “All I know is that he’s put Joseph Bonaparte in charge of Paris, with all its gates heavily armed,” Louis-Philippe says. “He’s trying to separate the allied armies and fight them individually. But it’s not working. Bonaparte is not used to fighting in retreat, less still to suffering so many minor defeats. Obviously, the Pyramid did not divulge its secrets…”

               “Or perhaps it did,” adds Weatherall. 

               At least this ends the overly serious mood. B ut then Julie surprises them all by saying, “I hear the Imperial Family has been sent away somewhere far in the south…”

             “Hah,” says Louis-Philippe. “Does he think he can use his wife as a bargaining chip with her father?”

               “The thought of his son being raised as an Austrian prince must worry him,” Weatherall says, pressing a web of dents into the tablecloth with the back of his knife.

               They do not have long to wait for most questions to be answered. Mere days later, the news comes that ourAllies have entered Paris, and Napoleon, along with his Imperial Guard, trapped in the palace of Fontainebleau, has finally signed the instrument of his abdication, the terms of which he’d ordered Talleyrand to negotiate, saying he would never himself detail the conditions of his own destruction. Fouchet had suggested the emperor be exiled to America; but Talleyrand, eager to ingratiate himself with a new regime, proposed a Bourbon restoration, with Napoleon exiled as Emperor of Elba, a tiny island off the coast of Italy, almost within view of his birthplace, Corsica. This new ‘empire’ is a cruel joke — he’s really to be a prisoner on the little island. He will, however, receive a pension of one million francs, and be allowed a retinue of four hundred soldiers and servants – although every man in his guard was still willing to leave wives and families to join him there in exile. The army had still not lost its faith in their emperor, the ‘little corporal’, as he was once affectionately known. His wife and child are not allowed to join him, though, given instead the Kingdom of Parma, and two Italian duchies, not so very far away across the Mediterranean. Even Napoleon’s mother is prohibited from accompanying him to Elba – although this restriction is later relaxed, giving the emperor access to the many millions Letizia has horded away over the years, certain such a day would come. Unlike her son, she has experienced far more of fortune’s vagaries, and she knows a fall is implicit in every rise. Most relatives flee, and most generals pledge allegiance to the Bourbon Crown — or else they’re dead. Only Joachim Murat, Napoleon’s brother-in-law, turned traitor, ordering his Neapolitan army to fight against remnants of those French forces still scattered across Italy. In April the Comte de Provence is officially invited to take the French throne as Louis XVIII; and an absolute monarchy is re-established in Spain. 

               The map returns to what it was – as Mr. Pitt had predicted it would years ago. So ends the most turbulent quarter-century in France’s history. Or so we think.

-xix-

 

               There is now much returning or swapping of seized colonies. For example, we exchange with the Dutch parts of Sumatra for the port of Cochin in India. It soon becomes clear why the Regent wants his daughter to marry the Prince of Orange: we’re obliged to return our lawfully appropriated properties in the Low Countries, and Wales feels the loss keenly. Loss is not something he’s well acquainted with and he possesses no faculty to deal with the concept. But outside and far beyond Carlton House all of England goes wild, hooting with delight that the war is finally over and life can go on its way again without ruin and death as boon companions. There are bonfires on every hill, drinking in every dale, dancing in the streets, lights flaring in every house, and more illuminations flickering on the domes and crenellations of government buildings. There’s also the new gas lighting, transforming nights in the city centre with their gloomy dangerous alleys into a fairyland of perpetual radiance. London glows these days like the very world’s own capital – which is exactly what it’s coming to be now the threat of Napoleon has been removed and desperately vital trade can resume. Now wealth can resume too, which is more to the point in the eyes of some. England is the only country left unscarred by the depredations of war; most of Europe was ravaged by the armies sweeping over farmlands and through cities, burning, looting, raping, murdering or just blowing everything to pieces, which tasks are what an army is really for. Someone else’s army, that is – and we haven’t seen one of those since 1066. So, we’re in excellent shape to proceed along the paths of peace and commerce, this nation of shopkeepers, as Boney called us when he was still an ogre. 

               Only one Englishman finds himself something less than pleased by all these indicators, festivities and celebrations: This is, of course, the Prince Regent. His latest reason for not being happy is that Czar Alexander has taken credit for vanquishing Napoleon. Wales usually has a reserve grievance, and he’s also furious that his coronation has to be postponed until the King dies; which is an event expected at any moment for the past few years, yet never arriving. Although he played no part in the war, Wales feels he did, feels our armies in the Peninsular were his armies and they played as great a role as Russia’s forces did. This is not untrue of course, but would be truer if amended to “nearly as great a role”. You would think at such a time that personal matters are put aside for global concerns. But no. Wales is additionally driven to distraction by a deluge of letters from his wife Caroline insisting that, when the time comes, she should be crowned Queen beside him. You ask yourself how much of her there is left to unravel. You wonder what it’s like inside her head. Although you’d rather be in that head if the only other choice was just the Wales noggin.

                “What happened to her world tour?” he asks Maria Fitzherbert, who still sees Caroline quite frequently. Whether out of habit or pity or common decency is hard to say.

                Maria now pats the spiralling nest of her hair, looking thoughtful. “You know how she is – not entirely rational,’ she says. He thinks: Substitute ‘remotely’ for ‘entirely’, as Maria goes on. “She really believes it’s her right to be recognized as the queen she’ll  actually be… unless they divorce. She insists on attending his coronation too, whenever that happens. I can only imagine Prinny’s mortification…”

              Shaking his head slowly, he says, “Christ! Is she mad? Wales hasn’t seen or spoken to her for twenty years, and she still thinks he’ll crown her his queen! It’s so… so… well, it’s pathetic is what it is…”

             “I see. But,” Julie says, aligning knives and forks into triangles on the dining table, “we know she’s mad, in her own sweet way; but what does the Law say about her rights in this matter? After all, she is still the future king’s wife…”

               “Then she ought to know that Wales will do exactly what he likes,” Edward says, wondering about her cutlery triangles, wondering how the darkness is behaving in the locked chamber of her mind.

              “She asked about Caroline’s legal rights,” says Maria acidly, “not what the Regent would or would not do…” He needs to remind himself that Maria too has her own unique darkness to contend with: Wales won’t talk to her now either.

                 “Ah,” he says, feeling reprimanded, feeling five. “Yes. Well, I must confess I don’t know what her legal situation is… but he could always cite the Delicate Inquiry, and maintain she’s been proven unfit to be his queen, couldn’t he?”

             “Possibly. But what might Parliament have to say?” Julie asks, rather too smugly for his liking, rather too deliberately.

               “For God’s sake,” he says irritably, “Wales will do exactly what he wants to do… How much clearer can I be?”

             “Clearly not much more,” says Julie, giving him a hard glare with granite eyes, a glare of impending night.

                “I’m sorry for bringing any disharmony here,” Maria says quietly and sincerely, looking from side to side at her hosts.

                 “No, no, no,” he assures his guest. “I’m the cause of it. Probably because I resent being under my brother’s control as much as Caroline does. But,” he goes on, after some consideration, stunned by his own frankness, “I also understand his frustration at being king in all but name. I wish my father could be made to abdicate… yet that’s no longer possible. You might as well ask the castle to relocate itself. He hears nothing, sees nothing, and understands less than nothing. Even if he signed the instrument of abdication it would be invalid, since everyone knows he’s not responsible for his actions…” He thinks: What must that be like, to not be the cause of your own effects?

              “Why not propose a bill in the House authorizing abdication by proxy in cases of insanity?” Maria suggests, no doubt wondering why no one else has arrived at the obvious.

              “It would make public something we’ve tried to conceal,” he tells her – one of the things we try to conceal. “And it also calls into question the whole monarchical issue…” Maria ought to have realised nothing is obvious in this family.

              “Which is what exactly?” says Julie darkly.

               “Monarchy has always been a thorny subject in England,” he explains. “The question of who exactly has the right of succession is still raised. We’re Germans, after all, and we don’t want to resurrect the issue of how we’ve come to rule, do we? There are still nobles who support a Plantagenet monarchy, or the Stewart line. Abdication would only antagonize such people. Some even support a Tudor succession, citing some Bristol farrier or Birmingham haberdasher as the legitimate heir…”

               “In a a word then, fear,” Julie says, looking amused, darkly amused.

                “If so,” he tells her, “it’s a fear that haunted even Henry VIII, who promoted the myth of King Arthur – his deceased elder brother’s namesake, I might add — to support the much-disputed notion of an English monarchic line existing at all. Henry showed the visiting Spanish sovereign King Arthur’s legendary round table – which had been a square table the week before, of course…” He’s trying to make this humorous, but inspiring mirth is not among his many talents.

            ‘We had similar arguments in France,’ Julie says, less darkly now – perhaps a little greyish though?. ‘In fact, our dear friend Louis-Philippe is considered by some to be the legitimate heir, the Orleanists and not the Bourbons…’ What, she wonders, happened to the Merovingians?

              ‘Well,’ adds Maria, fiddling with wax she’s peeled from the candelabra, ‘how did it all start, kings and nobles, I mean? It must have been the man who had the most pigs or sheep, no?’

              ‘And the most thugs,’ says Julie, almost lightly this time.

            ‘You don’t think God started it?’ he asks, quite seriously. But he really wants to see where everyone present stands on an issue important to all of them in one way or another, or so you would imagine. But he’s aware that believers in a divine right are thin on the ground in these modern times.

            ‘Ha. No, not God…’. God proves to be the biggest loser here tonight – divine right or not.

Queen Victoria’s Secret: Chapter 15.7

They now go into dinner, after a conversation that lasted for five hours, with Coulancourt noting that war is imminent and impossible to forestall.

               The whole thing, the whole man in a nutshell, Edward thinks, delighted with the irreducibly concise manner in which these notes have been written down and assembled here. He has only just obtained the Coulancourt conversation, and he now realizes for the first time that Napoleon had all the information he needed to avoid a war a full year before he started it. Furtnermore, Alexander’s ‘secret strategy’ had been devised long before the invasion, and was evidently never a secret, not from anyone who needed to know it. Napoleon has made the fatal error of underestimating an enemy — yet he’s infinitely resourceful. How will it end? How? This is what all of Europe is asking now, as it rests upon a razor’s edge.

             Fortunately, the mail has now resumed, and he soon finds out from Vincy’s informant long before most of the world knows anything.  

               With an army of raw new recruits spread around the centres of his old corps, what’s left of them, Napoleon is now facing the allied armies of Russia, Prussia and Austria, which had all entered Dresden. His new Grand Army is largely children, pensioners and the disabled. The title has become a sad mockery of valour and courage. The War of the Sixth Coalition proceeds back and forth across the scarred, exhausted continent. He enjoys a minor victory at Lutzberg; and then suffers a resounding defeat at the hands of General Blücher on the Katzbach. He’s next defeated by the armies of Prussia and Sweden aat Grossbeeren. This is followed by what becomes known as the ‘Battle of the Nations’, or ‘Battle of the Three Emperors’, at Leipzig, where the Grand Army endures its worst defeat yet. 600,000 men are on the field; but many of Napoleon’s German soldiery defect to join the Coalition; and the French are expelled from Holland, allowing that ungainly plucky youth, William, Prince of Orange, finally to return home.

            “This must be the beginning of the end,” Louis-Philippe says triumphantly, a future once more burning in his eyes. But the end is still not yet. And no one can possibly imagine what that end will be.

                Russians comprise more of the alliance than the nervous Austrians and muddled Prussians combined, and Czar Alexander is commanding them himself, Kutusov having died, vanishing over boreal horizons to meet up with his lost comrades-in-arms in a Russian heaven, where the Black Madonna dances with Cossacks, and the angels are all in furs. For the deeply religious czar, this is now a holy crusade, and he’s determined to liberate Europe from the Ogre Azazel, the fallen one.

                Something resembling the sun, but much paler, occasionally gives us a ghastly stare, as England sags and squelches around us. Three depressed sparrows attempt singing tunefully in the brown gardens.

             ‘Ah, spring is in the air,’ says Sir John Wentworth, on his first limping visit to Castle Hill.

            ‘I should hope so,’ says Edward. ‘It’s nearly June…’ He’s pleased to see the likeable old rascal, in spite of everything.

             Sir John has lost a lot of weight, though, and seems downcast, blurred at the edges. Without skimming the cream off Nova Scotia, his income must be severely reduced; and he dresses accordingly, in plain worsteds and a linen neckcloth. There’s a cobweb snagged on the tail of his grey wig, and he plucks at it in vain throughout his visit. Is it, wonders Edward, that tangled one woven by those who practice to deceive? No, it’s the web that spanned Castle Hill’s main doors until half an hour ago. He’d forgotten to add that chore to his lists. Ah, there’s the why Julie thought missing. Sir John evidently has some naval friends at Greenwich, for he comes bearing news of the war in America, news that hasn’t yet reached the papers. It’s a marvel that any news ever does. The Americans have invaded Lord Simcoe’s base of Fort York in Toronto Bay, burning it to the ground. The garrison managed to escape mostly unharmed, and the Yankees sailed away soon after.  In retaliation, our forces marched as far south as Washington, which they set on fire, razing President Madison’s new residence to the ground. Check. They also burned Buffalo and Detroit. But most of the heavy fighting has occurred back and forth across the Niagara River, especially at Queenston Heights, where Edward had stood gazing across the turgid waters at a seemingly barren United States, barren but peaceful then. A final attempt to grab Montreal was easily repulsed too, he learns, and the Indians are proving invaluable to us – as Sir John Johnson had long ago predicted they would. Check. It is later in the year that he receives a much-delayed letter from Louis de Salaberry, who says his son, Charles, has so distinguished himself in the Niagara fighting that he’s now hailed as the ‘Hero of Chateauguay’, a battle which defeated the Americans so conclusively that it may well have ended the war. Check and Mate. We are now claiming to have won it – but then so are the Americans, although with scant evidence to substantiate their claim. Truth be told though,it’s probably a stalemate – but their losses are higher than ours. Apart from the Niagara conflicts, the fighting had been notably undistinguished: it was more like a feud than a war — and it will drag on miserably for much of the year, as squabbles between neighbours tend to do. 

               ‘I shall now write with the news of Eduard’s death,” Julie decides. “At least they’ve had one cause for celebration…” Even she’s not convinced of this, although Louis sounded upbeat.

              ‘Just be careful with the wording,’ he says, ‘in case it falls into the wrong hands…’

            ‘Must you always say that? I’m not an idiot, you know…’

            ‘No, you’re not – far from it…’ The age of chivalry has not yet expired, and good manners are going strong, a cornerstone of good society, as they always will be – of this he is convinced.

              In another example of the army’s macabre insensitivity, a few days earlier they’d been presented with a summary of young Eduard’s autopsy report. The bullet killing him had been a clean shot and he would have felt no pain.

             “And you find that a consolation, do you?” Julie had said scornfully. 

              “No. Not in the least. It just revives the sorrow…’ And the sorrow is revived again today, as he watches her write to the Salaberrys. How much simpler those distant days were…days when he still commanded a regiment and was accorded a little respect ar home. He only needs a little. 

            His habitual response to disturbing emotions now, as it has been before on occasion, is to have his horse saddled and ride hard through the woods. But on this day, again as he has done before, he rides too hard, for the horse trips, throwing him onto rocks. One arm is broken; his jaw and nose are fractured, with his lip torn; and there are big purple bruises all over his big pink body. He manages to stagger back to the house, where a sawbones is called, and then he’s confined to his bed for many months, lucky to be alive – as his doctors tell him every time they visit. Julie fusses over him tenderly of course, differences pushed aside; but the healing process is very slow, and so painful that he wants no visitors at all. Naturally enough, his social work comes to a very abrupt halt. Lying there, with the house creaking around him, his clocks tick-tocking on their tables, and a muffled tweet coming in from the drizzled garden, he sometimes wonders if the fall was his way of punishing himself for Eduard’s death. He does feel some guilt over it, even though he’s not guilty. What a time to be laid up in bed, he thinks, devouring war news with his laudanum. First no army career, now this. Why? Who? It could well be voodoo.

              The end is surely approaching – the war’s, not Edward’s. Czar Alexander’s forces take Berlin without a fight: the French simply leave the city. Napoleon is slowly being pushed back towards the frontiers of France. The war between Russia and Persia ends with a treaty ceding what will become Georgia, Dagestan and most of Azerbaijan to Russia. But the Duke of Kent’s eyes are swimming over the page now, so he lies back, gazing at the portrait of Julie burning on his wall. She steps out of the painting, bringing him the copy of Robert Southey’s new biography of Nelson that he, Edward, had requested.

            ‘He’s now Poet Laureate,’ she says, in a reverberating voice, a voice of earth and rocks and subterranean caverns measureless to man. Isn’t there a sunless sea down there too somewhere?

          ‘N-nelson is?’ he asks her tremulously, reaching to touch her glowing cheek.

             ‘No, silly, Southey,’ she tells him, with an echo, the kind that rolls around the cupola of s stately pleasure dome. Like the Prince Regent’s in Brighton. Or is it Branadu?

            ‘And on that ch-cheek,’ he says, ‘and o’er that b-brow, so soft, so calm, yet eloquent, the smiles that win, the tints that g-glow, but tell of days in goodness spent, a mind at p-peace with all below, a heart whose l-love is innocent…’

             ‘How utterly beautiful!’ she exclaims, kissing his trembling hand. ‘Did you write it for me?’

             ‘Ah. Alas, no, m-my darling. Lord B-byron published it a few months a-g-go…’ His lips feel like someone else’s lips – an old pike’s fat flappers, perchance. The mind’s acting up too. So are the colours in this room. Christ, he thinks, I’d never noticed how very beauteous everything is in here. Does it always glow? 

               She has trouble getting his attention, and in the end snaps her fingers in his face, which makes him jump from his skin as she says, ‘Edward, darling, have you been taking too much laudanum?’

          The crack of her fingers now flaps around like a bat somewhere up in that plaster sky, so his answer is not a speedy one, but it comes: ‘Th-think so, y-yes. It’s all they g-give me…’ He’s not sure if he said this or just thought it, so he says it again. Or thinks he does.

             ‘As I said,’ she seems to say, ‘you don’t have to take it all…’ But she’s now beginning to dissolve into dacing white flames.

              There seems to be no need to speak again, so he remains in a silence that is far from silent to him. Wooden beams and masonry play a constant and not unpleasing, if rather formless music. There’s a crumbling tower to climb now, but the spiralling staircase doesn’t appear ever to reach those green battlements. In fact, it doesn’t seem to go anywhere at all. As you walk up, you find you’re walking down, and then you’re walking up and down at the same time. But you don’t mind this. Now Nelson is watching him warily from the cover of a book. Since thought is now speech, he finds he’s already told the revered late Admiral that he should have stayed in Quebec. I know, I know, says Nelson, shrugging. I would have, I wanted to; but some bugger tied me up and tossed me in the hold. He waves the arm he no longer has, saying, I struggled, and I still had me old arm. But by the time I’d got loose we’d reached the bloody Atlantic. It’s just one of those things, ain’t it, matey? But Edward is no longer listening to him. Kublai Khan has asked his advice on transportable pleasure domes, and now he only needs to find a sacred river called Alph, or Ralph. But this is a dream within two other dreams, one of them offering him a nice long sleep on fat feather pillows, and it is an offer he cannot ree…fuze…

              Even the cracking flapping bat settles down on a pillow next to his, and soon they’re both snoring like the Castle Hill drains.

-xvii-

              It is Monday, February 21^st, 1814. Napoleon has been victorious in three battles against the Austrians under General Blucher; but there’s been no news of his whereabouts for some time now. Weatherall, who’s just galloped all the way from London, comes running into the sick room, coughing violently. ‘Boney’s dead!’ he gasps, trying to catch his breath. ‘The Bourbons have been restored on the throne; it’s, it’s…’

          ‘What?’ he says, propping himself up on his elbows. ‘How?’

              ‘We just got a semaphore from Dover,’ Weatherall pants, his face crimson. ‘Some French colonel, a Bourbon, landed there at dawn. He told them to send the message, then he set out himself – but he won’t be here until tonight or tomorrow…’

              ‘Well, it’s wonderful news…’ He’s not at all sure about this.

            ‘Indeed,’ says Weatherall, loosening his collar. ‘Government securities are soaring on the Stock Exchange…’

            ‘Are they? I wish I had some. What exactly is a government security, Fred?’

                 ‘You lend the government money, and they give you more money back some years in the future. Providing they have any money then, that is.’ 

                      What both these men combined know about money could be engraved on an eyelash.

                ‘Ah,’ says Edward, blinking. ‘Doesn’t sound like a very good idea, does it? Aren’t they legally obliged to pay back what they promised?’

              ‘They don’t ptomise anything.’

               ‘Dear me, What sort of blockhead throws his money away in such a dubious fashion? I mean on such a seemingly dubious scheme. Perhaps “doubtful” is better?’ 

              The answer to this comes on very swift wings indeed, though. His brother Augie — Augustus, Duke of Sussex — wishes he had some government securities too; but his wish comes true, since he buys many bonds that afternoon, when their price has already doubled yet is still rising.

                 By now the whole city is fizzing and boiling with the news, the bonds, the soaring markets, money falling like manna, manna tasting like money, a city made of money, towers of it, highways, landscapes where it grows on trees as well as in the grasses, bush, rivers choaked by money to be netted, fished out, or dived for from money-boats with money-sails, ocean-going money sliding over money-seas of fathomless money to the fabled Lands of Money, where every enterprise is a bank filled to the rafters with money, money used to buy more money, until there’s enough to purchase continents of money, and one day soon moons and planets of money, an entire universe of money-galaxies teeming with money-stars, and then the kind of heaven that lets you take it all with you to add more to the luminous mountains of celestial money, home of the Great Banker, creator of money, made in his own image, of winking gold and creamy vellum. A pause in which to pant. Ah, is there anything else on earth that so quickens the pulse, so liberates the soul and sets men’s blood on fire the way just the mere thought of unlimited free money does? No? Yes? But listen to the entirety of London Town effervescing under the stony stare of a vapid sun in a flat sky, for what are minerals and gases compared to the cosmos of cash-unending, of gestating money that shits out monies all day and night in the money-strewn streets and money-laden lanes of a monied Spiritus Mundi? Or maybe its just the bilious rumbling of greed?

                 Old Bishop Fisher back at Kew used to say that these little things are sent to try us. In retrospect, you wonder if “try” meant some kind of trial, which means rules and fairness – if it doesn’t it should – or if it was “try”, as in “drive you barmy”, where there are no rules, and fair play is as likely as pink rain. You also wonder who the sender of these “little things” is, or was in Fisher’s mind, where God seemed to be be lurking behind most things. Could an ordained bishop and eminent theologian think of God as some sort of mischievous sprite? Does any other society on the great globe deify an astral kid who sees how many legs he can pull off an astral spider before it dies an astral death? Presumably that’s a symbolic death, Edward tells himself, since you can’t die if you’re dead – or can you? Doesn’t Christ mention a “second death”? Or is that Revelations, where everything and anything is mentioned? If you read it backwards under water and reverse every 17^th letter –or it is the 18^th letter, which gives you nine, since 1+8=9, and nine is – ABCDEFGH – I, meaning oneself. So… that “second death” is me, is it? Which would be the Self, wouldn’t it? Or is it the self, the ego? But the ego ought to die first. You don’t want to cart that off through the Elyssian Fields, do you? Maybe you do. Is that another one of those little things sent us by that preadolescent divinity, God the Brat? Father, Son, Holy Ghost and Sacred Brat, the nimbus crooked and grimy. The Holy Quarternity. Christ! He shudders, terrified the brainfever has returned. Has the thought of money’s autogenesis cracked his egg? Is money the root? Has Jack fallen down and broken his crown? Like Papa? And will Julie come tumbling after? Like Jill, whoever she is? The idea alone of incipient madness is awesomely, infinitely, eternally terrifying to him – and may itself precipitate the madness that was a moment earlier merely incipient, might it not? Breathe in deeply. Hold it deep. Breathe out long. Ah! Alone. All one? Like dear Papa. There are spots of time that have a fracturing anti-virtue, aren’t there? Just as others – the ones only poets experience, no doubt – have a fructifying virtue. Or does he call it a vivifying virtue? (Indeed Mr. Wordsworth calls it both, each in a different draft, and he will go on to decide it is rerally a renovating virtue. He should have stayed with the original thought, or so we think). A fracturating virtu?  Whoo! One minute you’re fine. The next you aren’t even certain what fine means; or, worse still, who you are and what that means. But who are you? For that matter, his spinning mind thinks, who am I? I am who? No, no, down boy! Steady as she goes. Heave-ho, me hearties. Drop anchor. Lower the mizzen, lads! Land ho! Oh. Ah. He rises from the sickbed like a stalk of grain crushed by the deluge and now drying in the sun, wherever the sun is, if the sun is ever anywhere in England. He stamps his big steaks of feet and shakes himself the way a wet dog does. God, it only lasts for a minute, but that minute lasts forever. Is this how poor Papa feels, or wonders if he feels, feeling wonder, or how? He, the Duke of Kent, needs to move around, get back down into the flesh, in the mud of life. Move, move, move! And his big, compliant, sometimes testy, but always friendly body wraps itself around him like a heavy old greatcoat, and he tastes the sweet nectar of simply being once again, being here and now. Thank you, Great Spirit. Now I understand why money is kept from me. Thinking money will make you happy is like drinking poison in order to kill your enemies. It won’t work the way you thought. It works the other way, the unthought or thoughtless way. No way. Just don’t do it. Just because a man is born in a stable doesn’t make him a horse. 

                 So, what has been sent to try us today, O Sacred Brat? I’ll wager it’s good one, a real mind-wringer. And it is. Three French officers in Bourbon uniforms are seen celebrating in a tavern; and the story is on everyone’s lips. Ogre dead; world can breathe again. Although this is not the the real story. A Colonel de Bourg, fresh from Paris, had landed at Dover and run straight to the Ship Inn, where he related his momentous news, which was then relayed to London via the Duke of York’s rapid communications system. That thieving rat! It spread like wildfire – the news, not the rat — and sent all government-issued stocks rocketing up in value (see above for dangers in this). Augie had borrowed ten thousand pounds from the Regent to invest, and by the end of trading that ten thousand was now worth fifteen thousand. By the next morning it was worth twenty thousand; and by the following afternoon it was worth…five thousand.

                When the news from France received no corroboration, traders grew uneasy, and people started selling – but not the Duke of Sussex. By the time Augie unloaded his bonds, the price had fallen back to its old value, the value they’d had five hours before Augie was able to buy at twice the price. Stock Exchange authorities were now very suspicious, and they’re generaly quite suspicious, because money is suspicious of itself and thus breeds suspicion in those close to it, just like malevolence and catarrh or a chill. All contagions spread – it’s just their nature. Soon, it was discovered that three men had purchased over a million pounds in government securities the previous week, and then tripled their money by selling late on Monday afternoon – twenty hours before Augie became a buyer. You do not need to be Nathan Rothschild or Lady Elgin to smell this enormous putrefying rat.

                   Before long, three men, including Lord Cochrane, were arrested for perpetrating a hoax and a fraud. Some reports said it it was a fraud and a hoax. One decides it was just a crime they’d perpetrated. Such details can be of great use to a defense counsel, so don’t dismiss them out of hand as trifles. The men had posed as Bourbon officers and were responsible for spreading the manure of misinformation all over town. Their guilt was hard to establish, however, because they did have a defense counsel each, and a brace of barristers from the Inns of Court, men whose time literally is money. Although this time it wasn’t worth the money, because the men were each sentenced to a year in prison and a fine of one thousand pounds, as well as a day in the public pillory – a punishment people tend to forget we still have.

               The Regent does not forget, though, telling Augie he’ll be pilloried if he fails to come up with the five thousand pounds he now still owes him, after handing over the five he managed to salvage by selling for ten shillings a pound, half of what he’d paid. We can add Augie’s financial expertise to that engraving on the eyelash, and there will still be room there for another get-rich-quick wheeze. 

               Edward must now explain patiently that he can’t lend Augie a penny, since he doesn’t have one himself. His bank balance has been inscribed with red ink for so long that he finds black ink showy; and the enormous sum emblazoned at the end is in money that only sells and cannot buy. His riches are poverties – which may be why it is poverty that enriches him. Figuratively. ‘I find this trade in stocks rather dubious,’ he says, smoothing down the wisps of licquorice-like thatch glued to his scalp. ‘I mean, it presupposes a company will grow infinitely, doesn’t it? But that’s impossible in a finite world…’

              ‘How does it presuppose infinite growth?’ asks Augie disconsolately.

              ‘Well, the stocks have to keep growing in value for people to want them, don’t they? If people no longer want them, the price falls and the company’s in trouble – when all that may have happened is profits evened out, do you see?’

            ‘No, I don’t see…’

            ‘It strikes me as a good system for building a business, but it’s flawed when that business ceases to grow – and all businesses surely must cease to grow eventually, no?’

                ‘Neither of us knows anything about business or money,’ says Augie irritably, ‘so why pretend we do?’

              ‘Ah. Well, I’m learning quite a lot these days…’

              ‘Not enough to get out of debt…’

              ‘No. Not that much – but welcome to the club…’

              They say love grows old and waxes cold; but are they right? He finds himself worrying about this frequently, as a disconcertingly gentle winter drains into a soggy spring, with grubby clouds piled high on the horizon, and dun-coloured leaves shrouding the crushed green grass. Finally, he feels recovered enough to hobble about the house, and even entertain some guests. It is Weatherall who says, ‘Forgive me, Edward, but is something wrong here?’

              ‘Wrong? Here?’

               ‘Yes. It seems somehow gloomy, shadowed…’

               He’s right about this. There’s something strained between him and Julie. The shadow of death has fallen over their lives, and it lengthens, it solidifies. Jack fell down, broke crown… He feels it creep up his spine and grip his heart with a dead hand. And Julie came tumbling after…It makes every conversation not ring true somehow; they sound forced, hollow, insincere. They speak their lines like bad actors; there’s no conviction in the words; the intonation’s all wrong. Is the love still there? He believes so; but it’s like the blinding blaze in a potter’s kiln when it’s closed and sealed over with clay. There’s heat but no light. He doesn’t know how to bring this up with Julie, though. Vinegar and brown paper? She seems too on edge these days, too irritable for any heart to heart talk. He hopes this will pass; he hopes it will all pass. But the umbra is obdurate, persistent. There’s another difficulty too. He’s been getting anguished letters from Princess Charlotte, which are smuggled out of Windsor Castle by a friend, Mercer Elphinstone. In these letters Charlotte complains bitterly that the Regent has hoodwinked her into a marriage agreement with William, Prince of Orange, a man she finds ‘so ugly I have to turn my face away from him or I shall commit vomitus’. Edward sympathizes with her since the Orange Prince has teeth as horizontal as Colonel Dodd’s and is an inveterate pessimist. He thinks: Didn’t Wales himself once express scorn for the Orange one? Why the sudden alliance? Yet for him to meddle in the Regent’s affairs again would be a monstrous mistake. He tells her this in an apologetic letter, begging Charlotte’s pardon for his shameful cowardice. Now he’s just been told that her horror at the prospect of this forced marriage has driven her to seek sanctuary in the one place her father will never venture. She has fled to her mother’s new house at Connaught Place. Montague House has been sold to pay off Princess Caroline’s impressive debts. As you might expect, all hell has broken loose at Carlton House – he shudders at the very thought of it — and the Regent has now sent his Prime Minister, his Lord Chancellor, his Lord Eldon, and even his Bishop of Salisbury all over to dissuade Charlotte from pursuing this brazenly rash course. Wales is not going himself, naturally he’s not – he’d rather slit his wezand with a knife than give his abandoned wife the satisfaction of seeing him grovel. However, these great men he sends are all kept waiting in their carriages outside the house, their visits declined. Then the Duke of York is sent; and he’s admitted; but he’s kept waiting downstairs for four hours; as Caroline and her errant daughter roll about up in their drawing room, squealing and giggling with delight at the ruckus they’re creating. Very annoyed, York eventually slouches back to Horseguards. Augie, Duke of Sussex, is sent next – he’s in no position to refuse the Regent anything now – and he’s allowed upstairs to see the miscreants, since they both like him and see no threat. Edward now listens to Augie’s account of this meeting:

            ‘I said, Charley,’ says Augie, ‘I have all the sympathy on earth for you, lovey, but you’ve got to obey your father’s will and leave here immediately. You don’t have a choice…’

              She refuses at first, of course, refuses adamantly. There’s yet another difficulty too. Just as Edward had said she might in jest, Charlotte has now actually fallen in love with a dashing young man, Captain Hesse, and is now conducting an illicit affair with him – a handsome but highly unsuitable man. This very dangerous liaison is facilitated to a considerable extent by Charlotte’s new governess, Cornelia Wright, who quickly grew fond of her spirited young charge, and pitied the isolation in which she was kept. So, out of this pity, Charlotte was often allowed to remain alone in a room with Hesse – although Miss Wright, when challenged, lies about the ‘alone’ part, swearing that she too is always present.

               ‘Charley, I told her,’ Augie continues, ‘do you honestly think the Regent doesn’t know about you and Hesse. Everyone knows about it, lovey. I could tell she was shocked to hear this. He’s very well aware of it, I tell her; but he’s now willing to overlook it — if you leave here with me now. What does she do? You know Charley. She starts to make demands and impose conditions…’

             Augie then ferries these demands over to Carlton House, where Wales is in such a tempestuous rage that he’s ready to order troops to storm Connaught Place and carry his daughter off – or he is until warned of the scandal this would most certainly create. And that in turn would almost certainly create a new nadir for his own lack of popularity. This last prospect does make Wales think twice about the assault on Caroline’s house, however – and that makes him even angrier. The poker comes out; furniture suffers; Augie hastens back to Connaught Place. As dawn approaches, a weary Charlotte begins to see the futility of her position and, eventually, she agrees to leave for Carlton House – but only so long as she’s able to ride there in a royal carriage. Mother and daughter scream with laughter — but she’s not joking. This final demand takes some time to arrange, but by mid-morning she leaves to face her father’s wrath. Edward must get the rest of this story from her.

             The Regent had greeted her calmly, even warmly, but he had with him Lord Eldon, a pedantic old lawyer, who’s widely known as ‘Old Bags’ – evidently because his father had been a coal merchant in Lancashire. A witness, ideally a lawyer, is what Wales now invariably arranges to be present when he’s about to mete out a punishment, seal a contract, or take some sort of drastic or reckless action. He has a horror of the law courts and wants to make sure he doesn’t end up in one. He thinks there are people out to get him; and he’s right – there are many of them too.

              “What would you do with her if she was your daughter?” he’d asked Old Bags.

               The lawyer replies in his thick, droning northern brogue: “I’d lock ‘er oop an’ throw away t’keys, is what I’d do, it is…” He looks as if he’d enjoy doing it too.

                  Charlotte isn’t going to take this quietly. She says, ‘Papa, it’s profoundly insulting for me to be compared with a coal carrier’s daughter…’

               ‘Given your recent behaviour,’ says the Regent sternly, ‘you’re lucky not to be compared with a bawd’s pox-riddled jade…’ Instead of taking Old Bags’ advice, however, he tells her she’ll be banished to a lodge in Windsor Forest: …where you’ll receive only authorized visitors, and communicate with no one by letter until the letter has been read and approved by creatures of my own choosing…’ 

                 As usual, though, Charlotte finds a way around these prohibitions, which is how Edward first learns that he too is on that lengthy list of forbidden visitors. Unfair; cruel. He forgets what he’d told Charlotte about life’s unfairness. 

Queen Victoria’s Secret: Chapter 15.6

-xvi-

                It’s nothing like as bad as the one in Russia, but England’s winter this year is still bad enough. You might not lose the largest army ever assembled in it, but your lungs hurt when you breathe; your fingers feel as if a horse is biting them; and you can’t feel your toes at all. It’s hostile, unnaturally so. Louis-Philippe maintains it’s not a climate — it’s a curse. It certainly interrupts the Duke of Kent’s meandering philanthropic travels. Julie and he only venture out once, riding in a closed carriage to London so they can view the rare spectacle of a frozen River Thames. It does happen, but not often. So thick is the ice now that an entire fair is in progress on it, with a small ferris wheel, apple-bobbing, jugglers, strongmen in thick leotards, archery, skating, dancing, skittles, and stalls selling everything from eel pies to roast chestnuts, not to forget ten dozen kinds of liquor, much of it hot, each stall bearing a gaily painted sign advertising its wares in letters two feet high. Wrapped in blankets, people take sleigh rides from London Bridge to Chelsea, with a parcel of hot chestnuts to keep them warm. It makes our aging lovers nostalgic for the old days at Quebec, with the speedy carricul rides bumping over undulating ice out to Montmorency, where music, warm punch, blazing fires, roast venison, and dancing were always waiting.

             ‘Why does one not appreciate the things one has when they’re all around?’ she asks him.

             ‘Are you appreciating the things currently all around you?’ he asks her, as their sled thumps its way past the Houses of Parliament, pulled by an immense carthorse shod with spikes on hoofs like tuffets.

                ‘No,’ she tells him. ‘Because I’m comparing it to Quebec – and there is no comparison, is there?’

              ‘Hmm. I rather thought there was…’ What he reaally thinks is that it is youth you yearn for, not those ancient events or happenstances. Youth – the thing wasted on the young, just as it was once wasted on you. 

              The road back to Ealing is treacherous, with deep ruts and divots hard as granite, and long sheets of grey ice on which the horses keep slipping. Their carriage nearly topples over on an especially bad patch, and they cling to their seats to avoid being hurled out. The experience doesn’t encourage them to leave Castle Hill until a thaw arrives; so, they spend their time reading to one another, and writing letters.

               There is no more prolific correspondent than the Duke of Kent. With the help of his new secretary, Mr. John Parker, he now calculates that he had despatched over eight thousand letters last year alone. He can dictate ten in an hour to Parker, whose ability to take down what he says without a making single error is eerily remarkable. Edward will write to anyone; he even writes to Louis-Philippe, who lives nearby and visits twice a week sometimes. But he also writes to Julie, who lives a yard away.  Now, however, and most ironically, he can only write to her, if he needs to write to anyone – and need is a factor not to be underestimated here. The mail service has been shut down by harsh weather; and for some it is as if the churches have been closed by God Himself. This is why Edward is wasting time assessing and collating copies of his correspondence, poring over old letters, occasionally noting that a reply has not been received, or a promise not fulfilled. He’s struck by how brief some of his missives are: Did you receive his essay? Yours etc. That’s it. Many aren’t even complete sentences: Yes, five of them. Yours etc. He thinks: No one is going to publish these, are they? In truth, not every recipient even bothered to read them. Without the Royal Mail there’s barely any news at all; you wait and wonder, halted in time’s yoke; and few people, if any at all want to make the journey out to Ealing in this damp insult from on high. Villette has left to take care of an elderly sister at Hove. Weatherall is still working with the trainees at Horseguards; he rides over occasionally, but he has little news, and it is exceedingly occasionally that he rides. His bones are a decade older than Edward’s; and, as old bones will do, they’re beginning to let him know this disparity pointedly. You could usually rely on the crews docking along the Thames for updates on the great world, but no one can sail on the river now, and the coastal ports are a two day’s canter down ribbons of ice that will break your horse’s legs, and probably your neck too. Soon there will be railway lines – not soon enough for this winter, though. 

               And so, he tries to occupy his gaping vacuum of time in any way he can. He hires some local musicians and forms a house band, which plays creaking, squeeking waltzes as Julie and he spin foolishly around the ballroom on their own. It is not Eddie and his Amazing Dancing Fusiliers.

           ‘No,’ she says. ‘It’s two old crocks and some astoundingly awful fiddlers who must be tone deaf – or else wickedly malicious…’

                The orchestra does need more practice – and will get it here to be sure. In the meantime, busy-busy-busy, must stay busy, he draws up a complete list of all chores to be done in the house, what, where, who and when. And he makes another list of all regular duties performed, where, when and by whom; it runs to sixty very neat pages. Julie is tempted to ask if he shouldn’t add a “why” to these lists, but she knows the reason, because by now she knows him better than anyone ever has or ever will. 

               He is about to revise these lists a third time, when that rarest of sights, a messenger arrives, blue with cold and bearing a letter. 

               ‘Who from?’ yells Julie, poised over her pianoforte.

              ‘Christ,’ he says, ‘it’s from Sir John Wentworth…’

              ‘How’d it get here from Nova Scotia in this weather if we can’t even get mail from Twickenham?’

             ‘He’s not in Nova Scotia…’ Edward briefly mourns the pleasure palace at Bedford Basin, the pathways, the chimes, the majestic view.

            ‘Well, where is he then?’ She momentarily wonders why she needs even to ask this – but she knows the reason for that too.

             ‘Ah. Ealing,’ he says, goggle-eyed at this spectre from days of yore. ‘They’ve retired to England… and, God: they’ve rented a cottage not fifteen minutes away from here…’

              ‘Oh, Lord!’ she says, joining him in the drawing room and reading the sprawling note. ‘Atrocious hand. Well, I suppose we’ll have to invite them over, won’t we?’

              ‘I ought to warn Bill before she shows up on his doorstep…’ Christ, that vision of the Duke of Clarence as fox-hunting gelding floats across the room, horn blaring, crop smacking down on buttock.

              ‘Isn’t she a little old for that sort of thing now?’ She thinks: I know I am heading that way.

              He says, ‘Age cannot wither her, et cetera. We’ll have to see, won’t we?’ Is this odd delight he feels for these visitors or merely for the mail, any mail?

              But as it turns out Lady Frances spends most of her time out at Windsor with the Queen; and Sir John has been sick in bed for months, dreaming of Lucy, the little mullato girl left in Halifax, left by the wind chimes and heart-shaped lake at Bedford Basin, listening to her music box, all alone forever. Let Sir John dream on, as befits the after-dinner sleep of age, but Lucy’s on the muscly arm of some strapping great Mauroon entrepreneur, skipping down Basin Street, a nice black bun in her ballooning silken oven.

             As a lone and very tentative swallow flits stiffly across the gardens, and you can hear the trees start dripping, he has assembled all of his Napoleon notes into order within a folder entitled with panache Notes: Napoleon. What to do with them now? For want of anything better, he reads them, and, with apologies, so do we. 

              The emperor terrifies his mrshals, says the first sentence, and if he ever looks pleased it seems to be in spite himself… His smile is theatrical: the teeth show but there’s no corresponding expression in the eyes… When he wishes, there can be a power of persuasion and fascination in his voice… No woman was ever more artful in making you want or agree to his desires… Though he lacks refinement of manner, he can be gracious, or give the appearance of it, as a necessary part of the regal manner he assumes… He has a low opinion of human nature, and believes self-interest is everyone’s prime motive… He prides himself on being able to extract the most from mediocre men… He once says, ‘Probity, discretion and activity are all that I demand of a man’—he flatters himself here; he doesn’t demand integrity, but rather just the fortitude to serve him… Only dreamers are interested in ethical qualities… With women his attitude is at first unctuous, then lustful and possessive… He fancies himself a romantic, yet in fact he’s emotionally immature; he convinces himself that women find power the greatest aphrodisiac, yet he can still brag to Rose of his conquests the previous night, and in excrutiating detail too… He’s not a civilized man; he’s a child of the Revolution, a man of unscrupled ambition, a political and military genius of unequalled skill, courage and resolve; he can fake gentility and even grace when he wants to… He tells Metternich that if fortune goes against him he’ll drag down all of society as he falls… He has an encyclopedic knowledge of military history and strategy; but he approaches each battle on an ad hoc basis… Command is totally concentrated in his person… He’s emperor and C-in-C… He fusses over every little detail, from dress to provisions… (see R. Rosalea’s chart attached, scribbles Edward) His marshals are raised to dukedoms, princeships, even kingships, but he doesn’t trust them with the appropriate concomitant responsibilities, which weakens their confidence and self-esteem… His chief of staff, Berthier, has a role more like that of an aide or secretary – and his old school friend Bourienne is his secretary… He checks every detail on a battlefield — the country around it, intelligence, supplies, medicine, the disposition of troops… He has a quick temper, yet exaggerates it for effect… (viz. RR attach.) So indomitably pressing are his orders that no one dares ask for clarification, less still question them… He complains about the want of initiative, but his imposing manner makes it impossible to question him; and he complains of failures when he has declined to discuss plans with the men who have to carry them out… He’s difficult to serve; but his record of successes lends his orders a sense of unerring rectitude… He holds no councils of war – his orders are all – although in Moscow he did speculate about options with his marshals; but in the end they just obeyed his commands as usual… They march surrounded by a radiance whose warmth they can feel even years later… The ordinary soldier feels the same; he doesn’t have to oppress them into obedience… He abolished flogging… Glory is his incentive, the honour of serving under him, perhaps earning some recognition, a word of praise… Supremely aloof as he is, his potency as commander affects not just Frenchmen, but Germans, Italians, Danes, Dutch, Croats, Illyrians, Spaniards, Lithuanians, Poles… His armies are truly European… This paternal attitude is mimicked by officers: retreating from Moscow, the soldiers share their last loaf of bread with a wounded captain and carry him for many miles – he’d do the same for them; it’s a reciprocity of care… Discipline is founded on trust and affection; it doesn’t have to be severe… He’s tolerant of the men’s foibles and need for booty… Morale is vital in Russia, where much breaks down… He conveys to them in extremity that this is the life and death every man would choose for himself… Leadership is his greatest talent… (viz. RR att.) He is tremendously able to convey the assumption of victories – defeat is unthinkable… There is really little innovation in his battle strategies… His instincts tell him much, though, his feeling for the land too – he reads terrain like a book… He can brilliantly organize the convergence of two corps in the same spot at the right time… Fifteen years without a major setback, and his accomplishments in many other fields – it all lends him a mystique, a mythic stature… But the price of his success is over-confidence… His overweening strength of will prevents him taking any advice… He believes destiny has sent him to conquer half the world… He can’t tolerate rivals or equals… He says to Fouchet: ‘My destiny is not yet accomplished; the picture as yet exists only in outline; there must be one code, one court of appeal, and one coinage for all Europe. The states of Europe must be melted into one nation, and Paris will be its capital…’ He says he purified the Revolution, dignified nations and established kings – at what point can he be assailed? He finds his absolution everywhere… He says the dictatorship was an utter necessity… He has not assaulted liberty, he says, he has purged it of anarchy and licentiousness… He claims never to have been the aggressor in wars… His enemies led him to absolutism, leaving him no choice… As for his ambition, he says, ‘This passion doubtless I have, and in no small degree; but at the same time my ambition is of the highest and noblest kind that perhaps has ever existed. Historians would regret that such an ambition was not fulfilled or gratified – this is my whole history in a few words…’ But his ‘few words’ are all lies… He only dignified nations by their struggles against him; his was an empire of brute force; his enemies did not foist the monarchy on him, he attempted to impose it on them; in war he was always the aggressor… In the case of Russia his motives are unforgiveable, his towering pride becomes destructive… Tyranny commands obedience but not consent… Invasions call for more invasions, and an empire becomes top-heavy, with its component parts – the vassal states comprising it – waiting for the fissures to appear thet will bring it toppling down… With her conquests, France had alienated nations; with the Revolution kings were alienated; so she could have neither friends nor allies, only subjects, and these were resolute – she could either subject them or be subjected to them… Western, southern and central Europe is under the control of one man… We are the only defiant enemy, and we are only engaged with his armies in Portugal and Spain… But we can’t land forces on the continent without the support of a major power; so, we remain in our island fortress, and he can only hope to disrupt us with an economic aggression… His only other recourse is to attack our potential allies there – hence the Russian campaign; and this produces the opposite result… Russia will be our salvation… His stated reasons for the invasion are the czar’s refusal to cooperate with his plan to bankrupt, squeeze and starve us into submission; yet this could never have worked… We export to Europe our iron, our textiles, and the raw materials from our empire, the cotton, sugar, tea and coffee… We import wood from the Baltic region, and corn, mainly from France… A blockade has been in place since 1793, but he tightens it… There’s supposed to be no trade at all between us and Europe; furthermore, the Berlin Decree says all our goods under French control are to be destroyed… We respond to this with our own blockade against France and her allies… In 1807 at Tilsit, Alexander agrees to abandon us as an ally and enforce the blockade… A Milan Decree later that year increases the blockade to include ships from neutral countries that stop at our ports; but this only aggravates those countries, like America, and soon Russia, who see in the measures an emblem of his tyranny… The destruction of our goods causes suffering to others as well as to us… Our suffering is immense all the same, with bread no longer affordable by the poor; but we find other outlets for trade in the US and Turkey, beyond his control; and smuggling to the continent thrives… After complaints from his own farmers and merchants, he’s obliged to ease some of the measures, and even allow the export of French corn to us, which renders useless his major weapon – starvation… Soon most of our wheat imports are coming from Europe… He should realize the system can’t work; but instead he convinces himself it can if it’s severely enforced… In all this many suffer, but none more than Russia… When the timber exports are halted, her government loses custom duties, her merchants much of their profits, but her aristocracy, owners of the forests, they lose most of their income… Since she could export nothing now, she could also import nothing, not even sugar, since an imbalance of trade prevents it… The czar has to do something… At the close of 1810 he issues a decree banning the import of all luxury goods, which are mainly silk and wine from France; and at the same time he allows neutral ships to enter his harbours, which gets around the ban on them entering German ports… N. protests, but Alexander points out that Russia is only doing what France has done for some time, allowing some luxury exports and welcoming neutral ships: ‘Your Majesty cannot expect to impose on the Russians privations you no longer impose on yourself…’ This is reasonable, but there are other aggravations:.. both France and Russia are in a competition for new territories… Alexander has seized Finland, and he badly wants to take Constantinople, and is thus at war with Turkey… Napoleon has seized the German coastal state of Oldenburg, and the czar resents this, since its duke is married to his sister; he also suspects France of seeking to enlarge the Duchy of Warsaw and create a Polish Kingdom right on Russia’s border… Napoleon suspects Russia, which seized a large swath of Poland twenty years ago, of designing to grab the rest… They’re both now also rivals for Sweden… There’s no trust; but he alone believes their differences can only be resolved by war… Alexander thinks a settlement can be reached through compromise and fair dealing, with an equilibrium possible… There is also the more personal issue of his second marriage to the Austrian Marie-Louise, a great neice of Marie Antoinette… He’d originally proposed to Alexander’s sisters, both Katherine and Anna; Katherine married the Duke of Oldenburg, though; and the dowager empress, as was her right, said Anna was too young… But rumours spread that she’d also said the marriage would be a pact with the Devil… Napoleon felt slighted; so the Austrian marriage was pursued, with the help of Metternich, who advised King Francis it was a good idea, since his country wasn’t strong enough yet to fight France again… Czar Alexander was suspicious of this new alliance with Austria, cemented in the nuptial bed… He was still more suspicious when, soon after the wedding, Napoleon refused to ratify his promise not to revive the idea of an independent Poland; and this was followed by the annexation of Oldenburg…

               In Luneberg Edward had learned that fear of attack by two great powers provokes an attack by one of them, a defensive stance turning into an aggressive one – he notes this here.

               Napoleon convinced himself that Russia would be the aggressor… The war was not inevitable, as some say; it happened because he wished it to happen… Alexander, a very religious young man, now views him as an embodiment of evil, and sees Russia as the instrument designed by Providence to defeat him… Both men regard himself as the greatest emperor on earth; although he thought the czar had accepted second place at Tilsit… Alexander thought French expansion would end at Russia’s borders… Both were wrong… The czar knew a French victory in any war would close the Baltic ports and the Black Sea, ruin England, and cow his two allies, Austria and Prussia; therefore he dreaded the eventuality… Napoleon relished it, thrilled by the immensity of such a project and its employment of all his many talents…

             And, thinks the Duke of Kent, here’s a real history of the war in a ‘few words’. But it is a final document that most intrigues him. He’s just obtained a copy of notes taken by General de Coulancourt, Duke of Vicenza, of a conversation he’d had with Napoleon on June 5^{th ,} 1811. Coulancourt had been the French ambassador to St. Petersberg for four years, and he’d come to know Czar Alexander very well indeed. His relationship with Napoleon was more complicated: he admired the man but was uneasy in his presence — although he always spoke his mind to him. Their conversation proceeded on these lines, or at least it does in Edward’s notes and his copy of it:

Napoleon: Your views are now pro-Russian, aren’t they?

Coulancourt: No, sire. But I’m proud to be against this coming war and to have done all I could to prevent it. But it’s an outrage to doubt my fidelity and patriotism.

N: Your damnable despatches, always claiming Alexander wants peace. On the contrary, sir, he’s treacherous and arming for war.

C: He’s done nothing more than take precautions when he saw his frontier menaced by your troop movements; and he was naturally alarmed by recent events in Poland and Oldenburg.

N: (Explodes with rage) You fool. He duped you. Do you honestly believe that Russia doesn’t want war and would remain in the alliance, and take steps to uphold the Continental System if I satisfy her with regard to Poland?

C: It’s not only a matter of Poland, sire. There’s your troop concentrations in Danzig and Prussia…

N: Ah, they’re afraid then?

C: No, sire. But being reasonable people they prefer an open state of war to a situation which is not genuine peace.

N: So, they think they can dictate to me, do they?

C: No, sire.

N: Nevertheless, if they insist on my evacuating Danzig just to gratify Alexander, that amounts to dictation, doesn’t it? Before long I shall be in the position of having to ask Alexander’s permission to hold a parade in Mainz. They think they can lead me on a string like that King of Poland. I am not Louis XV! The French people would not tolerate such an humiliation. I tell you, they want to make war on me…Besides, they broke the Continental System, didn’t they?

C: Russia adhered to her side of the agreement, sire. You yourself broke it by licensing French ships to trade with England…

N: (pinches Coulancort’s ear) Ah-hah, are you really so fond of Alexander, eh?

C: No, sire; but I am fond of peace. May I have permission to give you some advice?

N: Go on…

C: I see only two possible lines of conduct: to reestablish Poland and proclaim her independence, thus getting the Poles on your side; or to maintain the Russian alliance, thus bringing about peace with England, and settling your affairs in Spain…

N: Which line would you take?

C: Maintain the alliance, sire. It is the more prudent course, and the one more likely to lead to peace…

N: You are always talking about peace, Coulancourt. But peace is only worth having when it’s lasting and honourable. I think Alexander is afraid of me…

C: No, sire. Because, while recognizing your military talent, he has often pointed out to me that his country is large but, though your genius would give you many advantages over his generals, even if no occasion arose to fight you in advantageous circumstances, there’s still plenty of margin for ceding you territoty. And to separate you from France, from your resources, would be in itself a means of successfully fighting you. Czar Alexander said it would not be a one-day war, that Your Majesty would be obliged to return to France, and then every advantage would be with the Russians. Then the winter, the cruel climate and, most important of all, the czar’s determination and avowed intention to prolong the struggle, and not, like so many monarchs, have the weakness to sign a peace treaty in his capital… These are the very words of Czar Alexander which I quote to Your Majesty…

N: Admit frankly that it is Alexander who wants to make war on me…

C: No, sire. I would stake my life on him not firing the first shot, or being the first to cross his frontiers. Alexander’s parting words to me were: ‘It is possible, even probable that we shall be defeated, but that does not mean your emperor will be able to dictate a peace. I shall not be the first to draw my sword, but I shall be the last to sheathe it. People don’t know how to suffer. If the fighting went against me, I should retire to the country rather than cede provinces and sign treaties in my capital that were really only truces. Your Frenchman is brave, but long privations in a bad climate wear him down and discourage him. Our climate, our winter will fight on our side. With you, marvels only take place when the Emperor is in personal attendance; but he cannot be everywhere; he cannot be absent from Paris year after year…’ These were his exact words, sire…

N: Hah. One good battle will knock the bottoms out of my friend Alexander’s fine resolutions. He’s fickle and feeble… Ah, it’s the Austrian marriage that has set us at variance. He’s angry because I didn’t marry his sister…

C: No, sire. That is a travesty of the truth. But it is for you to decide if there will be peace or war. May I beseech Your Majesty when you make your choice between the certain good of the one and the hazards of the other to take full account of your own welfare, and of the welfare of France…

N: You speak like a Russian…

C: On the contrary: like a good Frenchman, like one of Your Majesty’s most faithful servants…

N: So, Poland?

C: Sire, the Poles don’t particularly want to be liberated by you. All over Europe there is the conviction that when you interest yourself in the affairs of a country it’s to serve your interests not theirs…

N: You think so, do you?

C: Yes, sire.

Queen Victoria’s Secret: Chapter 15.5

 Louis-Philippe, the Duc d’Orleans, now lives not far away at Twickenham, subsisting on a small pension granted by Parliament. He learned to live frugally as a schoolteacher in America, so he’s used to economy now. He’s one of Castle Hill’s favourite guests, and as eager to follow the course of Napoleon’s Russian campaign as the zealous Duke of Kent. He’d made a proposition of marriage to Edward’s sister, Princess Elizabeth, a proposition which Queen Charlotte naturally rejected out of hand, to Edward’s dismay. He will eventually marry Princess Amelie Marie of Sicily, although he will always carry a torch for Elizabeth. Some things, often the good ones, are not meant to be. You wonder if there’s a reason for this. 

                Tea leaves are expensive during this time; Edward gives the ones he’s used to his valet, who uses them twice, before handing them on to a gardner he’s friends with; and this man will then pass them on to someone in the village. You must make sure servants don’t steal your tea. One morning, while breakfasting alone with Louis-Philippe, Edward is just relocking the tea caddy after spooning its contents into a pot himself, when an equerry, flushed and sweating after what must have been a hard gallop from London, excuses his interruption by announcing that Prime Minister Spencer Perceval has just been assassinated by a gunman in the House of Commons’ lobby.

              “He’s dead?” says Edward, somewhat unnecessarily, as he soon realizes to his chagrin.

             “Yes, sire…”

             ‘Thank you, Captain…ah… dismissed, I suppose…’ He exscuses himself to Louis-Philippe, and rides hard to Carlton House, where he imagines the Prince Regent will be in a panicked palaver, or something similar that his bulk can manage. Soaking wet and spattered with mud, he’s shown into a drawing room, offered coffee, and told that the regent is sick in bed and will see no one. No one. Marvelling that Wales can’t force himself to rise at such a time, he sips coffee alone. Until a door bursts open and a very flustered Duke of York comes stamping in. With his rotund paunch and spindly legs, York now resembles a portly stork.

              “What an ill-tempered, bad-mannered, nasty tub of lard that Georgie has become!” York grumbles, searching noisily for a decanter.

             “What happened, Fred?” The name seems wrong for York. It belongs to Weatherall now. 

              “He all but accused me of killing the fucking Prime Minister,” says York, a little calmer after swallowing some Malaga wine. “You’d think the murder was just a conspiracy to exacerbate his alleged illness, that great toad! Drink is his only ailment. I’ve never been so insulted in all my life!”

             I find that hard to believe, Edward thinks; but he says, “What of the government? Who’ll take Perceval’s position?” It seems to be a reasonable question under the circumstances; but he’s uneasy around York.

             “You don’t want to ask him that. In fact, you don’t want to ask him anything – you don’t want to see him at all. Fuck him.’ A creaking pause, as he looks reproachfully at the wine. Then, like a man bitten bya dog but now bandaged up and more relaxed, he says, ‘I think Lord Liverpool’s going to be PM, though, but I’m not certain.’ This uncertainty seems to irritate him. ‘All he wants to do is quarrel – and he has it in for you, Eddie. Oh yes, he does; he kept cursing you for something or other. What the fuck have you done now?” The words ring around crystal on the drinks plateau.

             “But I was told he wouldn’t see me…” The earlier refusal now seems to Edward like a benison, a mercy.

               “So was I,” York yowls, “but I went up anyway – and I wish to God I hadn’t. What the hell happened to the sweet brother we used to have, eh? What?” What with his father in Bedlam, he may be no one’s favourite now. 

               Edward thinks: the brother you used to have, maybe; and he says, “The Regency is not what he imagined it would be – is that it?” A great wave of anxiety suddenly breaks over him, and he clutches at the seat of his chair, now thinking of his father, not Wales. The thousands of days behind him rush naterring into his face, trying to bite it off to see who’s underneath.

             “Nothing ever is,” says York, whose own past is now stomping around nearby. “I was bringing him good news too: Wellington defeated the French at Salamanca, retaking Madrid and forcing Boney’s brother, the so-called King Joseph, to flee back to France. You’d think this would have cheered him, but oh no! Everything infuriates that fat fuckface. He’s so dosed up on laudanum all day you can’t be certain he even grasps what you’re saying. Sometimes I wonder if he’s going to be as mad as our poor papa…”

              How to respond to this? “Ah. Well. That’d be a disaster, wouldn’t it?”

              “Not necessarily,” says York, with an odd buoyancy in his discordant tone. “It would make little Charlotte queen, with, one assumes, me as regent…until she reaches her majority. Me!” The word doesn’t sound like a word. It doesn’t even sound human. Me!

            Christ, he thinks, never ask if it can get any worse. But Edward too has a giddy sense of displaced euphoria, which makes him say, rather recklessly,“I suppose there’s no point in me asking you for a command, is there?” He sighs inadvertantly at the sheer pointlessness of his question. 

              “Well,” muses York, in a facsimile of contemplation, “Georgie did mention something about sending you to Malta, but it struck me more as a punishment. I said you’d probably not accept it unless Gibraltar was thrown in too…” He’s watching for Edwards reaction, watching like those creatures that pounce very suddenly.

             He thinks this conversation has a babbling tinge of the lunatic asylum about it. “You’re right about that, er, Fred. Malta, of all places — Christ!” He stands abruptly, almost involuntarily, saying as he does, “I don’t know why I waste my time here…” It is a lie, because he knows why, but isn’t sure why he knows it.

             “Neither do I these days,” agrees York, pouring himself another quart, and sounding like any other interlocutor. Until he adds, ‘And my time’s far more valuable than yours…’

               God, he thinks. It must be bad if York’s being even faintly civil to me. Is this Regency going to destroy the country before Napoleon even gets here?

               ‘You should stop fucking brooding is what you should do.’ This is York’s advice, and it does sound a little like advice, or it would if anyone had asked him what they should do.

                ‘Well,’ says Edward, lost for any appeopriate response, and needing fresh air, ‘yes, I should. This has been nice, hasn’t it? Seeing you, I mean. Prime Minister’s shot to death…ah, that’s what I came here for and…’ He prays for help to find a way out of this verbal labyrinth, but this isn’t one. ‘And,’ he goes on, clawing at semantic walls, ‘and havng come, and done, I must – God, is that the time? – yes, I must rush, and… Do give my kind regards to… to… er, to your wife. Yes. How is she? That wife of yours? All right, is she? Because… um, I…’

               It is York who terminates this gibbering, saying, ‘Eddie, get Dr. Willis to have a gander at your brain, will you? Now fuck off, for Christ’s sake – you’re giving me indigestion.’

               Outside the air is sweet and he gulps it down, thinking you could sell this stuff in bottles. Big bottles they’d have to be. Then he thinks: What did I do to these men in a previous life that I have to spend this one as their dog? Or their bitch? He feels so much better when he’s nowhere near Wales and York. You wonder if there’s a message in this – or you would if there were time for wondering these days. 

               

-xiv-

               By now he’s patron or president of 53 charities and philanthropic societies, including the Royal Humane Society, the British and Foreign Bible Society, the Royal Society of Musicians, the London Orphan Asylum, the National Benevolent Society, the Auxiliary Bible Society, the Royal Eye Infirmary, the Friendly Female Society, the Society for Delivering Poor Married Women in their Own Homes, the Covent Garden Theatrical Charitable Fund, the London Corresponding Board of the Incorporated Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge in the Highlands and Islands, the Irish Charitable Society, the Freemasons’ Charity, the Smallpox Hospital, and St. George’s Hospital. He’s also inaugurated a scheme long dear to his heart, his big beating heart. Using the system developed by Joseph Lancaster, whereby older pupils pledge to educate younger ones – each one teach one — he has opened schools for the children of poor soldiers; and then gone on to use the Lancastrian system for educating willing adults as well. Many of these men are inspired to participate after seeing their children succeed in learning to read and write, once the impossible dream itself. The modest success of this elicits a torrent of activity from Edward, who’s prone to such torrents, but hasn’t been lately. When America declared war, but waged a skirmish, he managed to raise ten thousand pounds for the relief of Empire Loyalists caught between the two sides. From now on too, he begins appearing in public regularly to speak on behalf of various causes, including standing in the House to support the movement for Catholic Emancipation, citing, among many reasons, the beneficial effect this will have on the highly unstable Irish Union. He’d read a book on the subject. But no less an authority than the Archbishop of Canterbury personally reproves him for this. It’s inimical to the Church of England, he’s told, and therefore inimical to King George. The archbishop also condemns his patronage of the reformist Bible Society, which is contrary to Anglican doctrine. But the Bible Society’s success in educating the poor drives the Anglican Church to set up similar schools of its own. Shame accomplishes what raw need had failed to do. The pity is that his brothers aren’t shamed into doing something other than what they habitually do – and this monumental shortcoming is pointed out a little too frequently by the press.

               ‘Lord,’ says Julie, ‘these journalists love you, don’t they?’ And she reads from an article in her morning’s newspaper: ‘The Duke of Kent’s good works are now too numerous to mention; but suffice it to say he has done more in one year than his six brothers have managed to achieve in their entire lives…’

               ‘Christ!’ he says, watching a red squirrel in the garden ransack red leaves for nuts, ‘That’ll go down well at Carlton House and Horseguards, won’t it?’ He sees it going down, a mountain of ripe shit crushing Piccadilly and Pall Mall, and then sliding inexorably towards Buckingham House. If the Queen’s there, he thinks. 

              ‘Who cares what those loafers think?’

             ‘Me. I’m forced to care. And, dear God, look at this!’ He shows her a grotesque cartoon of the Regent engaged in an activity for which his vast bulk is pitifully ill-suited. ‘I wouldn’t want to be anywhere near Piccadilly when he sees that…’ I don’t want to be anywhere near London, he thinks.

              Julie then tells him, ‘Another piece here says his windows were smashed by a mob shouting support for Caroline…’

              ‘Ah. That’s always happening. They like Caroline again; and they’ve always pitied Charlotte. Now they blame Wales for the wretched economy too, and the war, and the high cost of everything…’ And the endless misery they call weather, he thinks, his rheumatism reminding him of this. 

              ‘Ridiculous,’ she says. ‘If he ever did anything, I could understand it – but he does nothing…’

             ‘You don’t make mistakes that way,’ he tells her, thinking he’s better off when Wales does nothing, since he’ll be one of the mistakes his brother is bound to make if he ever gets out of bed.

                Travelling the length and breadth of England to inspect the progress of his numerous causes keeps him well away from Carlton House; and he’s now enjoying considerable success in raising further funds from the growing class of  industrialists, entrepreneurs and innovators, with some of whom he’s forming friendships, based as much on a vision of Britain’s future as on charitable donations. Such men have championed the need for swift construction of a railway system, along with new canal networks; they firmly believe this will place us far ahead of Europe in trade once the war’s over. And that will be conjoined with economic and military power — once the war’s over. Edward has no doubt that these men are right; yet such advanced thinking is hard to impress upon others — especially those with the capital needed to finance such massively expensive endeavours.

                He dispatches Weatherall and Villette up to New Lanark to report on Robert Owen’s progress with his model factory. This gives him a little time to think, something he hasn’t had time for since… since when? Ever? No, he tells himself, wasn’t there a few days in… Was it Boston?

              Apart from accounts of Napoleon, all he reads these days are books and articles concerning an imminent future where machines will greatly assist in the means of production, leading to a manifold increase in productivity across the board, not only in the factories, mills and mines, but in agriculture too. He recalls his father mentioning an engine that could bale hay a hundred times faster than a man; such a device exists – and so do many others. This all makes the work of education and labour reform vital, so he believes. If I could only keep this busy always, he tells himself, I’d have no time to worry, would I? For many are now noticing the plight of both workers and the poor, as our cities expand, growing more and more crowded, less and less hospitable. Mr. William Blake, the poet and engraver, speaks of a New Jerusalem to be built here among the ‘dark, satanic mills’. Mr. Wordsworth shows us the abandoned farming villages, the dispossessed wanderers, the children worked to death, the landscapes scarred by industry – the “still, sad music of humanity”, he terms life, or life as it now is for far too many.

              Social reform, along with fear of the new society we might regret creating, now seem to dominate all intellectual discussion; and it’s the theme of innumerable novels, poems, and other works, ranging from prolix philosophical tomes to radical tracts, pamphlets and broadsheets. A great change is in the air; you can taste it. Ah. But like all change it’s being resisted fiercely in many quarters. He sees an inherent danger in this wanton misunderstanding. With only constables and soldiers to defend it, the apex of Owen’s pyramid feels a very false sense of security. It would only take the defection of educated armed forces, intent on protecting their own interests, to leave that tiny blue one percent with nothing to support it, nothing to protect it from the raging storm below, when “all that is solid melts into air”, as this state will soon be described in a Communist Manifesto. Inside its egg you can see the coming serpent writhe, practicing the moves it will make when it is ten thousand times larger.

               When Weatherall and Villette return from New Lanark, they bring him a gift: an advance copy of Robert Owen’s book of essays, A New View of Society, which will form the basis of Edward’s deeper thinking on this subject, which he comes to regard as the only one worth anyone’s time in this day and age. They also bring a glowing report of Owen’s experimental mill town, which is now fully functional.

               ‘Working conditions in the mill are exemplary,’ says Villette, energised by his time there – an energy he sorely needs these days. ‘The town and its workers’ cottages are a pleasure to behold: light, airy, charming communal areas, and a company store selling all their daily needs at a mere 20% profit to cover costs…’ He even claps his spotted hands in glee.

              ‘Ah,’ Edward says. ‘A far cry from the company stores I’ve seen. Workers were gouged of their wages in those places, and all because there wasn’t anywhere else for miles around to buy their essentials…’ Wrong, wrong, wrong, he thinks.

               ‘Owen’s schools are excellent too,’ says Weatherall, more sober than Villette, but still enthused at modernity. ‘Both the workers and their children attend lessons willingly; they seem to enjoy it. And most of the kids can already read and write – it’s extraordinary.’ He does think this, but he also mourns the slow passing of a world he was used to. We all get to be like that, eventually we do.

              ‘Truly,’ says Villette, furrows carved into his brows. ‘Rowdy behaviour and drunkenness during free time are all but unknown there. The men prefer to spend it in sports, or on embellishments to their homes – it’s remarkable how much they appreciate the nice little places he’s given them…’ Villette is beginning to wish he too had a nice little place, a refuge from the hurly-burly that now wearies him. It didn’t use to, but now it does. 

              “Yes,’ Weatherall agrees. ‘They seem genuinely aware how fortunate they all are in such a benevolent employer… Many even described the place to us as ‘paradise’ – for them it really is, I suppose…”

             “It’s true,” Villette chimes in, the energy flagging. “We heard some accounts of other places people had worked – appalling! You can see how much they respect what they’ve got now. The little town’s spotless, everything neat and tidy, doors freshly painted, flower beds blooming…’ He thinks he’ll weep if he says any more.

              ‘Owen told us that in spite his ten-hour work day productivity now exceeds that of mills where there’s a sixteen-hour day. He plans to reduce the time further as well — to eight hours!”

               “The man’s theories are right,” Edward says jubilantly, his ears ringing. “Workers treated with respect return that respect through their work — especially when they can share in its profits.’ A pause, as he imagines the drum roll, saying, ‘This, gentlemen, is the future, and we should be proud to be a part of it…” He tries to shut out the voice about to ask him what comes before a fall.

               He now becomes a fervent promoter of Robert Owen’s experiment, urging all the mill-owners he knows to visit New Lanark and judge for themselves if it’s a success.

              ‘I hardly see you these days,’ says Julie, as tea is being served in the music room. ‘Uh-uh: don’t respond, my love. I can see you’re happy doing this – and that’s what counts. Mr. Owen must be very impressed…’

             ‘Well,’ he says, ‘not much impresses him. Whatever’s done, he can always see more to do…’

               ‘It strikes me, Edward, that the transformation of a society where little has ever changed in all of history is no small undertaking, is it?’

            ‘Ah. Small? No, it’s not…But why should we live in a house like this when all those people are living in boxes?’

             ‘Well,’ she says. ‘Because it’s better?’

               You’re almost certain he’ll say “Ah”, but he doesn’t. He has an answer to his own question, but it’s not something you readily say to just anyone – anyone, trhat is, who doesn’t subscribe to a reasonable working hypothesis for explaining the quirks and quiddities of mortal existence.

-xv-

               A silence seems to have descended over Europe, a silence so complete and utter you can almost hear its thick rotundity.

             The conclusion of Napoleon’s Russian adventure gradually leaks in from various sources. Having waited in Moscow for a month longer than he could afford, and eventually conceding that Czar Alexander is not going to sue for peace, or indeed respond at all to his entreaties, the emperor realizes he must now make a retreat to France, where he’ll have to admit the invasion has failed. He does tentatively suggest an advance to Petersberg, to bolster up his reputation, but he knows it’s impossible, even if “impossible” is not a word in his vocabulary, not a word he’s ever understood. Until now, when it’s branded on his brain.

             As November comes to Russia, so does the real winter, with bitter cold and an army still clad for summer. It’s not just soldiers, this army, as we’ve said; it’s wives, mistresses, lovers, children, shoesmiths, gunsmiths, tailors, and all the people who follow armies for many reasons – or even for no reason. Food has run out entirely; and water is only obtainable if you can set fire to the frozen branches and melt snow, which when consumed causes hideous intestinal problems. Men drink their own blood; others cut off frostbitten fingers and eat them. Straw is now being used for bandages, and infections are common. Returning through Borodino, they encounter a soldier who’s been hiding inside the carcass of a horse for weeks, living off putrifying flesh he cuts from the animal’s innards and eats raw. Many die or succumb to wounds on the way, the ailing thrown in the back of carts, but pushed off when the going gets harder and their weight is an unwanted burden. Without appropriate shoes, the starving horses slip on ice and break their delicate fetlocks, becoming food now, rather than transport – as we know, everything becomes food in the end. Some men devour their dead comrades; some even carve up the dying for supper. Russian forces pursue them, the armies of Bennigsen, Wittgenstein and Barclay successfully attacking the French rearguard, or sometimes even Napoleon’s own flanks. Cossacks fly out from the frost-glazed bush with deadly results; on one occasion the emperor narrowly avoids being captured by them – only the Polish chasseur  uniform he habitually wears spares him from being identified. Wagons full of looted treasures are left by the wayside, as men realize survival is more important than booty. These people have now slept in the open for many weeks, in temperatures far below any they’ve ever experienced, below any they imagined possible. Noses, ears, toes, fingers and other appendages are gangrenous from frostbite, or they’re gone altogether, bone stubs sticking through black flesh. Obliged to construct a bridge across one river, engineers spend long hours up to their necks in freezing water; and then still more long hours when their bridge gives way. Nearly all are dead before the army has crossed over. And an army it is no more, less still a Grand Army. Of the many hundreds of thousands, only a few thousand remain around Napoleon, along with corps commanded by his stepson, Eugene, Murat’s dragoons and Marshal Ney’s regiment. 

               The emperor seems indifferent to all this suffering, often walking in the deep snow with his men rather than ride in his carriage; but, as December progresses and there’s nothing any longer to gain by this long and wearying trek homeward, he wisely decides to head off in his coach, and then a fast sleigh, with General de Coulancourt and a few men, travelling via Poland for Paris, where a coup attempt by General Malet has just been defeated. In his report on the disastrous campaign, Napoleon is unusually frank, yet he keeps emphasising his own good health, which has ‘never been better’. The reason for this, Vincy’s informant claims, is that Malet, leader of the failed coup, who’d recently escaped from a lunatic asylum, had forged a document announcing the emperor’s death in Russia; and with this counterfeit paper he’d managed to persuade a large number of people to follow him and form a new government, placing Louis XVIII on the throne of France. Learning this, Napoleon was enraged that, if he was believed to be dead, no one had proclaimed his two-year-old son as Napoleon II. The child is currently King of Italy. The vaunted dynasty is finally in place, after all. For the first time, though, the emperor understands how shaky his foundations really are. Thus, says Vincy’s letter, he now urgently needs to broadcast his own strength and fitness to rule far into the future. But he’s deeply in trouble, with his Grand Army decimated, and a war on two fronts still to fight. 

               Wellington is advancing from Spain across the Pyrenees, and a Russo-Prussian alliance has soon been joined by Napoleon’s own father-in-law, King Francis of Austria, once the Holy Roman Emperor. How the mighty have fallen – and, Napoleon must now see, will always fall as their star wanes. Czar Alexander has finally taken over command of his army, determind to finish in 1813 what was only started in 1812. This war is very far from over yet. The secret strategy has not yet achieved its goal; and three sizeable armies are now advancing on France from the north. This has forced Napoleon to do something he’s never done before: seek an armistice, allowing him time to rebuild his lost army – or resurrect it from the swamps and clay of fields and meadows scattered in a two-thousand-mile radius across Europe’s heart. The armistice is agreed to partly because the heroic Prussian General von Blucher also wants to strengthen and reorganize his own forces. Vincy concludes by observing that Napoleon has now presumably discovered inter-dynastic marriages are not the guarantee of security he’d clearly once imagined them to be. 

                Edward experiences a curious sense of satisfaction, knowing, as he in fact does, so much more about the war than almost anyone else. Little of this information will appear in newspapers for weeks to come. And it’s followed by a letter from Rose, who complains she’s herself been accused of fomenting a plot out at Malmaison, a plot to bring back Bourbon monarchy. While it’s true, she says, that many of her guests and friends were high-ranking figures in the old regime, there’s never even been a hint of conspiracy in dinner banter. The accusations only cease when Napoleon returns, and she’s seen to welcome him, and must thus still be in favour. She ends her note by relating that the emperor has told her, considering the lack of familial support for his son and from his father-in-law, that he might as well have stayed married to her, to his old Josephine, to our dear Rose. This is evidently more important to her than the looming catastrophe now faced by Napoleon, and indeed by all of France.

              Edward is left wondering why the emperor embarked on such a colossal blunder. There was no need to invade Russia. Apart from Spain, Europe had been relatively at peace for three years; although the French economy was not thriving, the empire was stable; Talleyrand had told his master England was amenable to a treaty – so why risk everything? Edward concludes that it is Napoleon’s restless spirit which drives him always to gamble, to risk, with a view to achieve more. And then still more. Romany Rosalea’s horoscope contained it all, like the serpent’s egg, fully-formed long before hatching out. It will not cease until Napoleon has either conquered the whole world, or else been conquered himself. And, Edward thinks, I could do that. He thinks it often during these uncertain months. But, as he soon decides, the emperor’s Achilles heel must be the flagging economy. All empires are expensive to run, especially when you have no cause to loot parts of them. The French currency is inflating like that damn crazy balloon of theirs, and there’s no work; banditry is rife in the provinces, where the poor cannot afford food. Would this be reason enough to embark on such a disastrous campaign? No reason seems sufficient for a war, though. Except the lust for glory. He knows himself what an irresistible temptation that is. Men have lied, murdered, treasoned and even bargained with Beelzebub for it – are perhaps even doing so now, but certainly will do so again soon ad forever. When wining is your only goal, what are you willing to sacrifice on the altar of someone or something who promises he can deliver your wish? Most aren’t faced with the starkly Manichaen option. But some are; and it may be you, who sweep the issue aside, refusing the offer of an honesty without strings – brcause, he tells himself, you already know what you would do, yet cannot shoulder the burden of confessing your need to hang onto means justifying ends. Is this, wonders the Duke of Kent, Stoicism stripped of Marcus and Xeno, whittled down to a repulsive creed espousing self-interest and dispassion as its god? 

Queen Victoria’s Secret: Chapter 15.4

-xiii-

                Louis-Philippe, the Duc d’Orleans, now lives not far away at Twickenham, subsisting on a small pension granted by Parliament. He learned to live frugally as a schoolteacher in America, so he’s used to economy now. He’s one of Castle Hill’s favourite guests, and as eager to follow the course of Napoleon’s Russian campaign as the zealous Duke of Kent. He’d made a proposition of marriage to Edward’s sister, Princess Elizabeth, a proposition which Queen Charlotte naturally rejected out of hand, to Edward’s dismay. He will eventually marry Princess Amelie Marie of Sicily, although he will always carry a torch for Elizabeth. Some things, often the good ones, are not meant to be. You wonder if there’s a reason for this. 

                Tea leaves are expensive during this time; Edward gives the ones he’s used to his valet, who uses them twice, before handing them on to a gardner he’s friends with; and this man will then pass them on to someone in the village. You must make sure servants don’t steal your tea. One morning, while breakfasting alone with Louis-Philippe, Edward is just relocking the tea caddy after spooning its contents into a pot himself, when an equerry, flushed and sweating after what must have been a hard gallop from London, excuses his interruption by announcing that Prime Minister Spencer Perceval has just been assassinated by a gunman in the House of Commons’ lobby.

              “He’s dead?” says Edward, somewhat unnecessarily, as he soon realizes to his chagrin.

             “Yes, sire…”

             ‘Thank you, Captain…ah… dismissed, I suppose…’ He exscuses himself to Louis-Philippe, and rides hard to Carlton House, where he imagines the Prince Regent will be in a panicked palaver, or something similar that his bulk can manage. Soaking wet and spattered with mud, he’s shown into a drawing room, offered coffee, and told that the regent is sick in bed and will see no one. No one. Marvelling that Wales can’t force himself to rise at such a time, he sips coffee alone. Until a door bursts open and a very flustered Duke of York comes stamping in. With his rotund paunch and spindly legs, York now resembles a portly stork.

              “What an ill-tempered, bad-mannered, nasty tub of lard that Georgie has become!” York grumbles, searching noisily for a decanter.

             “What happened, Fred?” The name seems wrong for York. It belongs to Weatherall now. 

              “He all but accused me of killing the fucking Prime Minister,” says York, a little calmer after swallowing some Malaga wine. “You’d think the murder was just a conspiracy to exacerbate his alleged illness, that great toad! Drink is his only ailment. I’ve never been so insulted in all my life!”

             I find that hard to believe, Edward thinks; but he says, “What of the government? Who’ll take Perceval’s position?” It seems to be a reasonable question under the circumstances; but he’s uneasy around York.

             “You don’t want to ask him that. In fact, you don’t want to ask him anything – you don’t want to see him at all. Fuck him.’ A creaking pause, as he looks reproachfully at the wine. Then, like a man bitten bya dog but now bandaged up and more relaxed, he says, ‘I think Lord Liverpool’s going to be PM, though, but I’m not certain.’ This uncertainty seems to irritate him. ‘All he wants to do is quarrel – and he has it in for you, Eddie. Oh yes, he does; he kept cursing you for something or other. What the fuck have you done now?” The words ring around crystal on the drinks plateau.

             “But I was told he wouldn’t see me…” The earlier refusal now seems to Edward like a benison, a mercy.

               “So was I,” York yowls, “but I went up anyway – and I wish to God I hadn’t. What the hell happened to the sweet brother we used to have, eh? What?” What with his father in Bedlam, he may be no one’s favourite now. 

               Edward thinks: the brother you used to have, maybe; and he says, “The Regency is not what he imagined it would be – is that it?” A great wave of anxiety suddenly breaks over him, and he clutches at the seat of his chair, now thinking of his father, not Wales. The thousands of days behind him rush naterring into his face, trying to bite it off to see who’s underneath.

             “Nothing ever is,” says York, whose own past is now stomping around nearby. “I was bringing him good news too: Wellington defeated the French at Salamanca, retaking Madrid and forcing Boney’s brother, the so-called King Joseph, to flee back to France. You’d think this would have cheered him, but oh no! Everything infuriates that fat fuckface. He’s so dosed up on laudanum all day you can’t be certain he even grasps what you’re saying. Sometimes I wonder if he’s going to be as mad as our poor papa…”

              How to respond to this? “Ah. Well. That’d be a disaster, wouldn’t it?”

              “Not necessarily,” says York, with an odd buoyancy in his discordant tone. “It would make little Charlotte queen, with, one assumes, me as regent…until she reaches her majority. Me!” The word doesn’t sound like a word. It doesn’t even sound human. Me!

            Christ, he thinks, never ask if it can get any worse. But Edward too has a giddy sense of displaced euphoria, which makes him say, rather recklessly,“I suppose there’s no point in me asking you for a command, is there?” He sighs inadvertantly at the sheer pointlessness of his question. 

              “Well,” muses York, in a facsimile of contemplation, “Georgie did mention something about sending you to Malta, but it struck me more as a punishment. I said you’d probably not accept it unless Gibraltar was thrown in too…” He’s watching for Edwards reaction, watching like those creatures that pounce very suddenly.

             He thinks this conversation has a babbling tinge of the lunatic asylum about it. “You’re right about that, er, Fred. Malta, of all places — Christ!” He stands abruptly, almost involuntarily, saying as he does, “I don’t know why I waste my time here…” It is a lie, because he knows why, but isn’t sure why he knows it.

             “Neither do I these days,” agrees York, pouring himself another quart, and sounding like any other interlocutor. Until he adds, ‘And my time’s far more valuable than yours…’

               God, he thinks. It must be bad if York’s being even faintly civil to me. Is this Regency going to destroy the country before Napoleon even gets here?

               ‘You should stop fucking brooding is what you should do.’ This is York’s advice, and it does sound a little like advice, or it would if anyone had asked him what they should do.

                ‘Well,’ says Edward, lost for any appeopriate response, and needing fresh air, ‘yes, I should. This has been nice, hasn’t it? Seeing you, I mean. Prime Minister’s shot to death…ah, that’s what I came here for and…’ He prays for help to find a way out of this verbal labyrinth, but this isn’t one. ‘And,’ he goes on, clawing at semantic walls, ‘and havng come, and done, I must – God, is that the time? – yes, I must rush, and… Do give my kind regards to… to… er, to your wife. Yes. How is she? That wife of yours? All right, is she? Because… um, I…’

               It is York who terminates this gibbering, saying, ‘Eddie, get Dr. Willis to have a gander at your brain, will you? Now fuck off, for Christ’s sake – you’re giving me indigestion.’

               Outside the air is sweet and he gulps it down, thinking you could sell this stuff in bottles. Big bottles they’d have to be. Then he thinks: What did I do to these men in a previous life that I have to spend this one as their dog? Or their bitch? He feels so much better when he’s nowhere near Wales and York. You wonder if there’s a message in this – or you would if there were time for wondering these days. 

               

-xiv-

               By now he’s patron or president of 53 charities and philanthropic societies, including the Royal Humane Society, the British and Foreign Bible Society, the Royal Society of Musicians, the London Orphan Asylum, the National Benevolent Society, the Auxiliary Bible Society, the Royal Eye Infirmary, the Friendly Female Society, the Society for Delivering Poor Married Women in their Own Homes, the Covent Garden Theatrical Charitable Fund, the London Corresponding Board of the Incorporated Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge in the Highlands and Islands, the Irish Charitable Society, the Freemasons’ Charity, the Smallpox Hospital, and St. George’s Hospital. He’s also inaugurated a scheme long dear to his heart, his big beating heart. Using the system developed by Joseph Lancaster, whereby older pupils pledge to educate younger ones – each one teach one — he has opened schools for the children of poor soldiers; and then gone on to use the Lancastrian system for educating willing adults as well. Many of these men are inspired to participate after seeing their children succeed in learning to read and write, once the impossible dream itself. The modest success of this elicits a torrent of activity from Edward, who’s prone to such torrents, but hasn’t been lately. When America declared war, but waged a skirmish, he managed to raise ten thousand pounds for the relief of Empire Loyalists caught between the two sides. From now on too, he begins appearing in public regularly to speak on behalf of various causes, including standing in the House to support the movement for Catholic Emancipation, citing, among many reasons, the beneficial effect this will have on the highly unstable Irish Union. He’d read a book on the subject. But no less an authority than the Archbishop of Canterbury personally reproves him for this. It’s inimical to the Church of England, he’s told, and therefore inimical to King George. The archbishop also condemns his patronage of the reformist Bible Society, which is contrary to Anglican doctrine. But the Bible Society’s success in educating the poor drives the Anglican Church to set up similar schools of its own. Shame accomplishes what raw need had failed to do. The pity is that his brothers aren’t shamed into doing something other than what they habitually do – and this monumental shortcoming is pointed out a little too frequently by the press.

               ‘Lord,’ says Julie, ‘these journalists love you, don’t they?’ And she reads from an article in her morning’s newspaper: ‘The Duke of Kent’s good works are now too numerous to mention; but suffice it to say he has done more in one year than his six brothers have managed to achieve in their entire lives…’

               ‘Christ!’ he says, watching a red squirrel in the garden ransack red leaves for nuts, ‘That’ll go down well at Carlton House and Horseguards, won’t it?’ He sees it going down, a mountain of ripe shit crushing Piccadilly and Pall Mall, and then sliding inexorably towards Buckingham House. If the Queen’s there, he thinks. 

              ‘Who cares what those loafers think?’

             ‘Me. I’m forced to care. And, dear God, look at this!’ He shows her a grotesque cartoon of the Regent engaged in an activity for which his vast bulk is pitifully ill-suited. ‘I wouldn’t want to be anywhere near Piccadilly when he sees that…’ I don’t want to be anywhere near London, he thinks.

              Julie then tells him, ‘Another piece here says his windows were smashed by a mob shouting support for Caroline…’

              ‘Ah. That’s always happening. They like Caroline again; and they’ve always pitied Charlotte. Now they blame Wales for the wretched economy too, and the war, and the high cost of everything…’ And the endless misery they call weather, he thinks, his rheumatism reminding him of this. 

              ‘Ridiculous,’ she says. ‘If he ever did anything, I could understand it – but he does nothing…’

             ‘You don’t make mistakes that way,’ he tells her, thinking he’s better off when Wales does nothing, since he’ll be one of the mistakes his brother is bound to make if he ever gets out of bed.

                Travelling the length and breadth of England to inspect the progress of his numerous causes keeps him well away from Carlton House; and he’s now enjoying considerable success in raising further funds from the growing class of  industrialists, entrepreneurs and innovators, with some of whom he’s forming friendships, based as much on a vision of Britain’s future as on charitable donations. Such men have championed the need for swift construction of a railway system, along with new canal networks; they firmly believe this will place us far ahead of Europe in trade once the war’s over. And that will be conjoined with economic and military power — once the war’s over. Edward has no doubt that these men are right; yet such advanced thinking is hard to impress upon others — especially those with the capital needed to finance such massively expensive endeavours.

                He dispatches Weatherall and Villette up to New Lanark to report on Robert Owen’s progress with his model factory. This gives him a little time to think, something he hasn’t had time for since… since when? Ever? No, he tells himself, wasn’t there a few days in… Was it Boston?

              Apart from accounts of Napoleon, all he reads these days are books and articles concerning an imminent future where machines will greatly assist in the means of production, leading to a manifold increase in productivity across the board, not only in the factories, mills and mines, but in agriculture too. He recalls his father mentioning an engine that could bale hay a hundred times faster than a man; such a device exists – and so do many others. This all makes the work of education and labour reform vital, so he believes. If I could only keep this busy always, he tells himself, I’d have no time to worry, would I? For many are now noticing the plight of both workers and the poor, as our cities expand, growing more and more crowded, less and less hospitable. Mr. William Blake, the poet and engraver, speaks of a New Jerusalem to be built here among the ‘dark, satanic mills’. Mr. Wordsworth shows us the abandoned farming villages, the dispossessed wanderers, the children worked to death, the landscapes scarred by industry – the “still, sad music of humanity”, he terms life, or life as it now is for far too many.

              Social reform, along with fear of the new society we might regret creating, now seem to dominate all intellectual discussion; and it’s the theme of innumerable novels, poems, and other works, ranging from prolix philosophical tomes to radical tracts, pamphlets and broadsheets. A great change is in the air; you can taste it. Ah. But like all change it’s being resisted fiercely in many quarters. He sees an inherent danger in this wanton misunderstanding. With only constables and soldiers to defend it, the apex of Owen’s pyramid feels a very false sense of security. It would only take the defection of educated armed forces, intent on protecting their own interests, to leave that tiny blue one percent with nothing to support it, nothing to protect it from the raging storm below, when “all that is solid melts into air”, as this state will soon be described in a Communist Manifesto. Inside its egg you can see the coming serpent writhe, practicing the moves it will make when it is ten thousand times larger.

               When Weatherall and Villette return from New Lanark, they bring him a gift: an advance copy of Robert Owen’s book of essays, A New View of Society, which will form the basis of Edward’s deeper thinking on this subject, which he comes to regard as the only one worth anyone’s time in this day and age. They also bring a glowing report of Owen’s experimental mill town, which is now fully functional.

               ‘Working conditions in the mill are exemplary,’ says Villette, energised by his time there – an energy he sorely needs these days. ‘The town and its workers’ cottages are a pleasure to behold: light, airy, charming communal areas, and a company store selling all their daily needs at a mere 20% profit to cover costs…’ He even claps his spotted hands in glee.

              ‘Ah,’ Edward says. ‘A far cry from the company stores I’ve seen. Workers were gouged of their wages in those places, and all because there wasn’t anywhere else for miles around to buy their essentials…’ Wrong, wrong, wrong, he thinks.

               ‘Owen’s schools are excellent too,’ says Weatherall, more sober than Villette, but still enthused at modernity. ‘Both the workers and their children attend lessons willingly; they seem to enjoy it. And most of the kids can already read and write – it’s extraordinary.’ He does think this, but he also mourns the slow passing of a world he was used to. We all get to be like that, eventually we do.

              ‘Truly,’ says Villette, furrows carved into his brows. ‘Rowdy behaviour and drunkenness during free time are all but unknown there. The men prefer to spend it in sports, or on embellishments to their homes – it’s remarkable how much they appreciate the nice little places he’s given them…’ Villette is beginning to wish he too had a nice little place, a refuge from the hurly-burly that now wearies him. It didn’t use to, but now it does. 

              “Yes,’ Weatherall agrees. ‘They seem genuinely aware how fortunate they all are in such a benevolent employer… Many even described the place to us as ‘paradise’ – for them it really is, I suppose…”

             “It’s true,” Villette chimes in, the energy flagging. “We heard some accounts of other places people had worked – appalling! You can see how much they respect what they’ve got now. The little town’s spotless, everything neat and tidy, doors freshly painted, flower beds blooming…’ He thinks he’ll weep if he says any more.

              ‘Owen told us that in spite his ten-hour work day productivity now exceeds that of mills where there’s a sixteen-hour day. He plans to reduce the time further as well — to eight hours!”

               “The man’s theories are right,” Edward says jubilantly, his ears ringing. “Workers treated with respect return that respect through their work — especially when they can share in its profits.’ A pause, as he imagines the drum roll, saying, ‘This, gentlemen, is the future, and we should be proud to be a part of it…” He tries to shut out the voice about to ask him what comes before a fall.

               He now becomes a fervent promoter of Robert Owen’s experiment, urging all the mill-owners he knows to visit New Lanark and judge for themselves if it’s a success.

              ‘I hardly see you these days,’ says Julie, as tea is being served in the music room. ‘Uh-uh: don’t respond, my love. I can see you’re happy doing this – and that’s what counts. Mr. Owen must be very impressed…’

             ‘Well,’ he says, ‘not much impresses him. Whatever’s done, he can always see more to do…’

               ‘It strikes me, Edward, that the transformation of a society where little has ever changed in all of history is no small undertaking, is it?’

            ‘Ah. Small? No, it’s not…But why should we live in a house like this when all those people are living in boxes?’

             ‘Well,’ she says. ‘Because it’s better?’

               You’re almost certain he’ll say “Ah”, but he doesn’t. He has an answer to his own question, but it’s not something you readily say to just anyone – anyone, trhat is, who doesn’t subscribe to a reasonable working hypothesis for explaining the quirks and quiddities of mortal existence.

-xv-

               A silence seems to have descended over Europe, a silence so complete and utter you can almost hear its thick rotundity.

             The conclusion of Napoleon’s Russian adventure gradually leaks in from various sources. Having waited in Moscow for a month longer than he could afford, and eventually conceding that Czar Alexander is not going to sue for peace, or indeed respond at all to his entreaties, the emperor realizes he must now make a retreat to France, where he’ll have to admit the invasion has failed. He does tentatively suggest an advance to Petersberg, to bolster up his reputation, but he knows it’s impossible, even if “impossible” is not a word in his vocabulary, not a word he’s ever understood. Until now, when it’s branded on his brain.

             As November comes to Russia, so does the real winter, with bitter cold and an army still clad for summer. It’s not just soldiers, this army, as we’ve said; it’s wives, mistresses, lovers, children, shoesmiths, gunsmiths, tailors, and all the people who follow armies for many reasons – or even for no reason. Food has run out entirely; and water is only obtainable if you can set fire to the frozen branches and melt snow, which when consumed causes hideous intestinal problems. Men drink their own blood; others cut off frostbitten fingers and eat them. Straw is now being used for bandages, and infections are common. Returning through Borodino, they encounter a soldier who’s been hiding inside the carcass of a horse for weeks, living off putrifying flesh he cuts from the animal’s innards and eats raw. Many die or succumb to wounds on the way, the ailing thrown in the back of carts, but pushed off when the going gets harder and their weight is an unwanted burden. Without appropriate shoes, the starving horses slip on ice and break their delicate fetlocks, becoming food now, rather than transport – as we know, everything becomes food in the end. Some men devour their dead comrades; some even carve up the dying for supper. Russian forces pursue them, the armies of Bennigsen, Wittgenstein and Barclay successfully attacking the French rearguard, or sometimes even Napoleon’s own flanks. Cossacks fly out from the frost-glazed bush with deadly results; on one occasion the emperor narrowly avoids being captured by them – only the Polish chasseur  uniform he habitually wears spares him from being identified. Wagons full of looted treasures are left by the wayside, as men realize survival is more important than booty. These people have now slept in the open for many weeks, in temperatures far below any they’ve ever experienced, below any they imagined possible. Noses, ears, toes, fingers and other appendages are gangrenous from frostbite, or they’re gone altogether, bone stubs sticking through black flesh. Obliged to construct a bridge across one river, engineers spend long hours up to their necks in freezing water; and then still more long hours when their bridge gives way. Nearly all are dead before the army has crossed over. And an army it is no more, less still a Grand Army. Of the many hundreds of thousands, only a few thousand remain around Napoleon, along with corps commanded by his stepson, Eugene, Murat’s dragoons and Marshal Ney’s regiment. 

               The emperor seems indifferent to all this suffering, often walking in the deep snow with his men rather than ride in his carriage; but, as December progresses and there’s nothing any longer to gain by this long and wearying trek homeward, he wisely decides to head off in his coach, and then a fast sleigh, with General de Coulancourt and a few men, travelling via Poland for Paris, where a coup attempt by General Malet has just been defeated. In his report on the disastrous campaign, Napoleon is unusually frank, yet he keeps emphasising his own good health, which has ‘never been better’. The reason for this, Vincy’s informant claims, is that Malet, leader of the failed coup, who’d recently escaped from a lunatic asylum, had forged a document announcing the emperor’s death in Russia; and with this counterfeit paper he’d managed to persuade a large number of people to follow him and form a new government, placing Louis XVIII on the throne of France. Learning this, Napoleon was enraged that, if he was believed to be dead, no one had proclaimed his two-year-old son as Napoleon II. The child is currently King of Italy. The vaunted dynasty is finally in place, after all. For the first time, though, the emperor understands how shaky his foundations really are. Thus, says Vincy’s letter, he now urgently needs to broadcast his own strength and fitness to rule far into the future. But he’s deeply in trouble, with his Grand Army decimated, and a war on two fronts still to fight. 

               Wellington is advancing from Spain across the Pyrenees, and a Russo-Prussian alliance has soon been joined by Napoleon’s own father-in-law, King Francis of Austria, once the Holy Roman Emperor. How the mighty have fallen – and, Napoleon must now see, will always fall as their star wanes. Czar Alexander has finally taken over command of his army, determind to finish in 1813 what was only started in 1812. This war is very far from over yet. The secret strategy has not yet achieved its goal; and three sizeable armies are now advancing on France from the north. This has forced Napoleon to do something he’s never done before: seek an armistice, allowing him time to rebuild his lost army – or resurrect it from the swamps and clay of fields and meadows scattered in a two-thousand-mile radius across Europe’s heart. The armistice is agreed to partly because the heroic Prussian General von Blucher also wants to strengthen and reorganize his own forces. Vincy concludes by observing that Napoleon has now presumably discovered inter-dynastic marriages are not the guarantee of security he’d clearly once imagined them to be. 

                Edward experiences a curious sense of satisfaction, knowing, as he in fact does, so much more about the war than almost anyone else. Little of this information will appear in newspapers for weeks to come. And it’s followed by a letter from Rose, who complains she’s herself been accused of fomenting a plot out at Malmaison, a plot to bring back Bourbon monarchy. While it’s true, she says, that many of her guests and friends were high-ranking figures in the old regime, there’s never even been a hint of conspiracy in dinner banter. The accusations only cease when Napoleon returns, and she’s seen to welcome him, and must thus still be in favour. She ends her note by relating that the emperor has told her, considering the lack of familial support for his son and from his father-in-law, that he might as well have stayed married to her, to his old Josephine, to our dear Rose. This is evidently more important to her than the looming catastrophe now faced by Napoleon, and indeed by all of France.

              Edward is left wondering why the emperor embarked on such a colossal blunder. There was no need to invade Russia. Apart from Spain, Europe had been relatively at peace for three years; although the French economy was not thriving, the empire was stable; Talleyrand had told his master England was amenable to a treaty – so why risk everything? Edward concludes that it is Napoleon’s restless spirit which drives him always to gamble, to risk, with a view to achieve more. And then still more. Romany Rosalea’s horoscope contained it all, like the serpent’s egg, fully-formed long before hatching out. It will not cease until Napoleon has either conquered the whole world, or else been conquered himself. And, Edward thinks, I could do that. He thinks it often during these uncertain months. But, as he soon decides, the emperor’s Achilles heel must be the flagging economy. All empires are expensive to run, especially when you have no cause to loot parts of them. The French currency is inflating like that damn crazy balloon of theirs, and there’s no work; banditry is rife in the provinces, where the poor cannot afford food. Would this be reason enough to embark on such a disastrous campaign? No reason seems sufficient for a war, though. Except the lust for glory. He knows himself what an irresistible temptation that is. Men have lied, murdered, treasoned and even bargained with Beelzebub for it – are perhaps even doing so now, but certainly will do so again soon ad forever. When wining is your only goal, what are you willing to sacrifice on the altar of someone or something who promises he can deliver your wish? Most aren’t faced with the starkly Manichaen option. But some are; and it may be you, who sweep the issue aside, refusing the offer of an honesty without strings – brcause, he tells himself, you already know what you would do, yet cannot shoulder the burden of confessing your need to hang onto means justifying ends. Is this, wonders the Duke of Kent, Stoicism stripped of Marcus and Xeno, whittled down to a repulsive creed espousing self-interest and dispassion as its god? 

Queen Victoria’s Secret: Chapter 15.3

-x-

               What does Saint Matthew say? A man’s foes will be they of his own household, is it? Well, he’s wrong. A bond is being formed between Edward and his younger brother Augustus, ‘Augie’, the Duke of Sussex. With their eldest brother now regent, they share many of the same concerns, childhood traumas, issues of abandonment, lack of parental affection, lack of parental everything, except severity, heartlessness, a punitive diet, and a sort of all-pervasive sense of beastliness. They share problems, and this sharing formis a new clique, one of their own. There’s no logic to it; but who expects to encounter logic in this family? This bonding happens, as you might dare expect, after Edward has forgiven Augie for betraying him to Wales.

               ‘It was understandable,’ he says, knowing it’s the sort of thing you need to say, even if it’s not true, ‘given the circumstances. I suggest we just forget it…’

               Listening to Edward’s ideas, and reading a few of the many, many books he recommends, Augie also becomes interested in reform, particularly the theories of Robert Owen. Indeed, the more they study together like students in the old Kew schoolroom, the more they are both convinced Owen is their man. He has a grerater grasp of the current situation and, most importantly, he’s devised ways to ameliorate it. Thus, soon they contrive to visit him at the London offices of a company which has made Owen very wealthy indeed.

                A mischievous-looking, sandy-haired elf of a fellow, he welcomes them in his bluff Welsh manner, not a shred of deference, less still obsequiousness. They’re taken into a cluttered, book-lined room, where it soon becomes luminously clear to Edward that this dedicated man won’t rest until he’s gained the Duke of Kent’s active support for his vision of a new society.

              “Here’s what we’re currently dealing with,” says Owen, indicating a wooden pyramid on his desk. It’s about two feet high and made of cubes whose various colours represent the different levels or classes of society. The largest level by far is the base, which is painted red and stands for the industrial working class and share-cropping or tenant farmers. Ascending through green owner-farmers, yellow merchants, and so on, the pyramid ends with an inch of apex painted blue. “That’s the landed aristocracy and monarchy of course,” Owen tells the two sons of a monarch in his atonal Flintshire accent. “And here resides most of the wealth, and all of the power. Yet, look you, it barely comprises one or two percent of the whole structure…”

             “That’s us,” says Augie, as if astonished to see his own lofty place in society. “It seems impossible we can control such a vast mass spread out below us…” The thought is newly-born, shell fragments and albumen still on it.

              “It will soon be impossible,” Owen tells him. “For the lowest mass is growing larger daily; and once they realize their power – boom! – it’s all over, boyo. Our job is to make the situation more equitable before the inequality is seen for what it is, and the whole pyramid comes tumbling down – as it will without its base. No one builds from the apex down. Every structure relies entirely on its foundations, no matter that the foundation be usually invisible…”

               “Education?” Edward inquires, gripped by an unnerving sense of déjà vu.

              “I know your efforts in that area,” says Owen, “but it will take much more than a few schools to change this. Education on its own is like throwing burning coal into a powder keg. Revolutions occur when things get better, not worse. When people see how badly they’ve been treated, they get angry, and such a justifiable anger knows no reason or bounds.  Why in Hades should it?” You can see a long line of Methodist ministers at the back of his eyes.

               “What’s your solution then?” says Edward. thinking: What an intense little fellow this is. He then wonders what sort of grievances the Welsh have as their history. Did we treat them badly? Probably.

              “I am weary of sermonizing,” Owen tells them, running delicate fingers up and down his social pyramid, but sounding far from tired of sermonizing.  ‘Probably my Methodist background, you see…” He laughs a modest private laugh. “Sermonizing merely infuriates the rich and confuses the poor. What I intend to do instead of talking, look you, is build a model factory town, around mills I’ve purchased up at New Lanark on the Clyde. It’s going to be a living, breathing example of the way industry ought to be organized in the future – if, that is, we’re to avoid catastrophic social upheaval. Ay. There will be a ten-hour work day, in a healthy, pleasant environment; there will be decent accommodations; there will be free education, naturally, naturally; drunkenness will be mightily discouraged; and promotion to senior positions will be by ability alone. Excess profits, if or when they come, will be shared among the workers on an equitable basis, according to seniority and skill. Of course, of course, these are just a few of my ideas for the project. The venture will be a trial, and no doubt I shall learn much along the way – much indeed…” He’s obviously a man for whom learning always has been a source of boundless pleasure.

              He thinks: These are the old dreams, the masonic ideals, but very practical now; and he says, “When do you plan to begin this great venture?’

                “It’s already underway,” Owen says triumphantly. “The problems involved are immense, though, vast, and a man like yourself…” A pause as he corrects his sentence: “Men like yourselves, will be of inestimable value merely in lending your support to the New Lanark project.’ Another weighty pause, as he rolls his eyes to stare at the roof of his skull before clearing his throat and continuing: ‘I am well aware, very well aware that financial support is not within your means – if I may be so bold, sir – but your royal blood will be worth more than gold… yes, as will your voices in Parliament…” His own voice is repeating itself somewhere up in the distant roof beams.

             Edward is somewhat embarrassed, saying, “How do you come to know so much about my personal affairs, Mr. Owen? 

             “Mr. Coutts, a good friend of mine, look you, has queried me on whether I should care to join a committee managing your…ah – if I may say so – rather disastrous fiscal predicament…” Now this does sound like a sermon. 

              Edward shudders, perspiration sliding from his armpits. “And shall you join it?” is all he says.

                “Not if it will prevent you from speaking out in favour of my own work…” He has thought this all through carefully, every word of it.

              Edward looks over at Augie, whose unfairly lush head of tousled hair nods enthusiastically, his eggs of knowledge now all in the pan.

                 “You shall have our complete support,” he tells Owen, “and whatever influence we can bring to bear in the House…” Whatever microscopic influence, he thinks.

              “Oh, good, very good; very, very good,” sings Owen, not expecting such easy success. “You are really the first among your class to understand the dire need for these changes – which is as it should be, look you, because, if we fail to support the base of our pyramid, you will be the first to fall…yes, you –unless you can fly, that is…”

‘Are the Welsh a humourous people?’ he asks his brother as they step out into a wall of drizzle.

                 ‘That one was,’ says Augie. ‘Every time he opened his mouth I wanted to howl with mirth. Boyo. Hey, what do you think those “look-yous” are all about?”

‘Welsh version of “what-what” and “hey-hey”, I imagine,’ says Edward, not wanting to think of their poor father at this moment.

‘God,’ says Augie, ‘who’d have thought we’d ever miss hearing those, eh?’

I would, thinks Edward. I did.

-xi-

              Thunder does in fact sound much like a cannonball being rolled across the wooden heaven’s balcony. We do not have to wait on tenterhooks for long. A lengthy letter unsigned by Vincy arrives two days before the rather sparse press reports dribble in. Napoleon left Dresden at 4 a.m. on the 29^th of May in a covered carriage pulled by six white horses, followed by marshals Coulancourt and Duroc in another. The emperor averages seven miles an hour to reach Glugau on the Oder in twenty hours. He stays two days at Posen and three at Torn. On the 7^th of June, after driving all day and night, the cortege arrives at Danzig, the main French base, where Murat and Davoust join up with him. He spends two weeks there and at Konigsberg, inspecting his troops and organizing his gargantuan administration. By the 23^rd of June he’s on the Russian frontier, the river Neman. He’s come 1,200 miles from Paris, and he’s still 500 miles from Moscow. This is history in progress; the invasion of Russia, of all the Russias, is on. Napoleon’s demeanour these days is withdrawn and lethargic, responding to the acclamations of his men merely with a nod; to the public, mainly crowds of women, he raises his hat but without looking in their direction. The poet Heine, then fifteen, watches him inspecting the guard at Torn. and will later write of: The eternal eye set in the marble of that imperial visage, looking on with the calm of destiny as his guards march past. He was sending them to Russia, and the old grenadiers glanced up at him with an awesome devotion, with a sympathetic earnestness, with the pride of death…. At night he’s overheard pacing up and down in his bedchamber singing the revolutionary song, Et du nord au midi la trompet guerriere a sonnee l’heure de combat – tremblez enemies de France!  It is not only enemies that tremble. Those Prussians and Poles, supposedly allies, who live in the vasty regions into which his army is now converging, they suffer terribly at the hands of men who act as if they’ve already entered enemy territory. The killing, looting, raping and burning go on unabated, as his unprecedentedly gigantic army tramples down crops, stripping rye from the fields to feed horses on their way to the Russian border. He now marches to Vilna and will then head along a highway to the holy city of Smolensk. Another missive from the czar still proposing peace is received at Vilna, but Napoleon scoffs at it: a sign of Alexander’s weakness and fear, begging for peace even as midnight is striking. Hah! 

                 Reports from both sides become less frequent now, as communication lines are stretched, and Russian armies spread out across the vastness of their land. But over the weeks ahead Edward pieces together the story from his different sources, as well as the letters that come from Geneva almost weekly – sometimes almost daily. 

                 The emperor is soon facing some severe problems. His wagons aren’t suited to the rough roads; wheels and axles break, supplies are abandoned. The heat is extreme; the dust is atrocious — men are blinded by it, forced to cover their heads with rags or leafy branches. Then the rains come. Wagons and gun carriages are now getting stuck in mud; most provisions are already three days behind the leading force, which means food is scarce for both men and beasts. The local grain storages have all been burned by fleeing peasants, who’ve also poisoned their wells with the rotting bodies of dead horses; and the fields have been stripped of whatever grew in them. Towns and villages along the way have been burned too; the soldiers were planning to loot and seek out food in these settlements; but instead there’s nothing except the odd turnip dug out of mud – and the thatch from roofs, which at least horses can eat. Divisions of the Grand Army sent through Lithuania, to attack the Russian rear, had expected to be greeted as liberators, the way they’d been in Poland. Instead they found the inhabitants hostile and surly, unwilling to supply food or shelter, less still to join with the French forces. Whether this was loyalty to the czar or fear of his retribution is hard for Vincy’s informant to say.  Seeing the main Russian force encamped near the horizon at sunset one day, Napoleon had prepared for a battle on the following morning. Yet, as a dawn mist cleared, the Russians were nowhere to be seen. Even scouts sent ahead reported no sightings in any direction; there wasn’t even a telltale dust cloud, which is always thrown up by large troop movements. The Russian armies are like ghosts, seen and then not seen, gone into the aethers, melted into the holy soil, the holy entropy. So, this, Edward thinks, is the ‘secret strategy’ we heard of: avoid giving him the decisive battle he wants, and keep him chasing you through a barren landscape with exhausted men and a supply line ever further behind – is that it? Clever, and well thought-out. You cannot tell the falcon from the falconer. Napoleon’s own reports, however, have the Russians fleeing his victorious armies, as they press on in glory towards Moscow. But they’re not fleeing, are they? It’s cat and mouse, with the mice sapping the cat’s energy, strength and resources, to grow larger than their predator. The French advance guard is soon on the verge of starvation; desertion is increasingly common, since many soldiers are from French vassal states; and ten thousand horses have now died, either from eating rank grass, or from sheer fatigue after pulling the heavy wagons or the four thousand cannon, hundreds of which have had to be left, either in cloying mud, or because there are no strong animals to drag them any further. Communications between the emperor and his various marshals are breaking down due to the vast distances involved; and the marshals are quarrelling amongst themselves — Murat nearly even fights a duel with Duroc. Troops flagging behind are subject to lightning attacks by Cossacks, who appear without warning from the woods, inflicting terrible casualties, and then galloping off as swiftly as they came. The emperor’s losses are already in the many thousands, without a single battle yet fought, and the summer now well past its prime. The Russian general Barclay marshals his armies at Smolensk, mere days before the first French forces arrive there. The men are shamed by Barclay’s policy of tactical retreats, which are all they’ve seen so far; but they will not retreat from Smolensk. They do retreat after it, though, vanishing like migrating geese over the misty boreal horizons. This is not the war a whole world has been expecting, for Napoleon had created those expectations, and it is nothing like the war he was expecting. 

-xii-

               Owing to the King’s sporadic but short-lived recoveries, the Regent finally holds a much-postponed grand fete at Carlton House to celebrate his regency. To no one’s great surprise, it is vastly ostentatious, with flowers and celebratory silk hangings everywhere, fountains of champagne on sidetables, and, extending down the middle of an immense dining table, a hundred-foot-long moat full of gold and silver fish. So atrociously sweltering is the summer heat, unfortunately, that many of these fish die and are now floating on their backs. Or is it on their bellies? Maria Fitzherbert had been invited, but, as she told Edward, she’d asked the Prince Regent at which table she would sit.

              “Any one you choose,” Wales had replied, “except mine.”

               “Considering my position,” she’d told him, “I ought to be at your side.”

               He’d laughed and denied her this request; thus, she declined his invitation. Sadly, it is to be the last conversation they ever have.

                 The Duke of Kent is seated between young Princess Charlotte and his young brother Augie, Duke of Sussex. The Queen had deemed the event unseemly considering the King’s illness, refusing to attend it herself, and then, as you might expect, denying her daughters the right as well.

                “Look who’s seated to my papa’s right,” says Charlotte, who’s not so little anymore, growing fast into a very attractive, graceful young lady. “He’s the vilest, meanest, most disgusting man I ever did meet…”

                It’s his other younger brother Ernest, now Duke of Cumberland, who’s wearing a silk bandage around his head for wounds received during a fight. You wonder if he’s murdered another valet with his razor, after raping the new man’s wife too. That murder had been played down by authorities to such an extent that newspapers generally blamed the valet for his unwarranted attack on innocent Duke Ernest. With a bilious tinge, Edward now recalls his sickening conversation with York, who’d asserted that most crimes could be made to vanish, if you knew the right people. Ernest knows the right people. What atrocity had he committed now to be yet again exonerated for? Edward doesn’t even want to know the answer. With the glossy sabre scar already disfiguring him, will these new wounds confer on the Duke of Cumberland a still more forbidding mien? For mysterious reasons, though, he seems to have become the Regent’s closest confidant this week, his beadsman, his right hand, seated at the place of honour, a place which many other guests present are infinitely more deserving of than he.

               “He scares me,” Charlotte says. “I don’t understand why I’m no longer allowed visitors at Windsor, yet he’s allowed to come. I never want to see him…” They grow up so fast, don’t they?

             “No one wants to see him,” Edward agrees, delighted with her. ‘Or no one we like… But why aren’t you allowed to have visitors outside of the family circle? That’s awful…’

              “You know Sir William Drummond?” she asks, daintily dissecting her lamb chop.

            “Vaguely. Didn’t he write a book against religion?”

            “Yes, yes!” she says brightly, as if he’s affirmed her whole world. “He once explained to me that the Old Testament was all allegorical nonsense, and he told me I ought to study oriental history, which he said was far more enlightening. But the thought of the Bible not being true scared me, so I told my bishop, who made me avow my catechism; then he must have complained about Drummond to Papa, who banned all my visitors. It defies reason, doesn’t it?” 

               Her mind has grown so fast too, he thinks, saying, “Why not just ban Drummond?”  

              “You know how Papa is…No one is permitted to attend my mother’s dinners anymore either – or no one of importance. So now she invites any old riff-raff, as long as they’re witty – or as long as she thinks they’re witty. Yet Papa can keep that odious Uncle Ernest around him day and night. It’s not fair…”

               “Life is not known for its fairness,” he says predictably. “Don’t expect it to be fair. I imagine, though, that the Regent also fears you’ll fall in love with a handsome, young, but highly unsuitable man if you have unlimited visitors…”

              “I wish I would,” she says, her opalescent blue eyes dissolving into the thought.

               “Isn’t this the very thing wrong with the little blue apex of Mr. Owen’s pyramid,” says Augie suddenly, waving around with his spoon at the ridiculously luxuriant decorations, food, table and its richly-clad guests. “If the poor could see all this gaudiness they’d be fully justified in setting up a guillotine in Piccadilly…” Augie is perhaps too instant a radical to be taken seriously – or else he’s just drunk.

              Edward doesn’t want to discourage his brother’s fervour, so he says, ‘Ah. Yes…’ and then he too looks around, looks at the bloated Regent, who reportedly weighs 40 stone now, resembling a bizarre parody of himself. The cartoonists are having monstrous great fun with him, eating England, swallowing his family, crushing his horse. But the real thing out-satires any satirist. One of Wales’ first acts as regent had been to promote himself, a man unacquainted with soldiering, from colonel to field-marshal. This is why he now wears the gaudiest dress uniform ever made on Savile Row, festooned with yards of gold braid, laden down with stars, medals, along with a whole plethora of civil and military honours – the latter not commonly seen on men who’ve never fought a battle or ever assayed a field to marshal. The only war he’s experienced, the only one he’s fit for, is the cold one with his wife – and that’s not over yet, after fifteen years. But we won’t mention this to Charlotte. Christ, he thinks, just look at our regent! Look. He wants you to look.  His sweating face is even redder than his jacket, which seems too small for him already, although it was only stitched last week. The chair, the room, the house all appear too small for him. Will England be large enough?  Servants keep emptying bottles of claret into a goblet the size of his head; and he pours wine down his gullet as if there’s a leak somewhere along the way to his oozing entrails. There’s no secret to getting fat; yet some people act as if it’s a mystery. There’s no mystery: you get fat when you eat and drink far too much every day for fifty years. We’re still at that stage, however, where corpulence is equated with wealth. You need to be able to afford to get fat; and the poor usually can’t afford even being thin. Wales can afford it. Look at him go! Edward sees his horse in bib and tucker banging a hoof on the table and whinnying as a caravan of food trundles steadily from the tropical heat of kitchens explosive with clattering activity. The eels in aspic; three dozen oysters; the lobster Thermidor, new from Paris and named for the old revolutionary summer month, apt in this steambath; the game pie; four ducks stuffed with goose liver; one glossy suckling pig with a bauble, no, an apple in its snarling white teth and a chestnut-veal-dumpling stuffing up its arse; a fish the size of Wales’ leg, wallowing in creamy shallot sauce; and – who knows? – a partridge in a pear tree, or a pair of patridges in treacle,  course after rich, fat-sequined course. What you wonder is how can he fit it all in? How? Belching and farting uncontrollably at times — you pretend not to notice — he bellows out blasts of bestial laughter, either at Ernest’s sordid, possibly unrepeatably vile jokes, or in tune with some spiteful witticism spouted by his latest mistress, Lady Hertford, whose face is as sharp as her tongue.

                 Edward now recalls that both Princess Caroline and his sister Sophia have complained that the Duke of Cumberland tried to rape them – ‘tried’, yes, but did he succeed? Their complaint was modest about details. It was some years ago; but Cumberland looks as if he could still do it – maybe he has? Caroline has neither forgotten nor forgiven the assault, that much we do know. She told Edward this herself. Her colossal hectoring mother had arrived from Brunswick by the time in question, which wasn’t long ago, and after staying some weeks with her daughter, she peremptorily demanded an establishment of her own, which was in fact to Caroline’s great relief. The mountainous old duchess was not easy to live with, had indeed never been easy to live with, even when Caroline was too small to live anywhere else. Finding a bust of Duke Ernest installed, for some unfathomably Brunswickian reason, in her mother’s new house in Hanover Square, Caroline, though big enough now to have fled here from Germany, was still too small to reach the sculpture. So, she took a poker and smashed it to fragments, and then ordered a maid to throw the pieces out a window into the street below. Perhaps, Edward thinks, this is the reason why Cumberland now wears a bandage? For Julie had once told him all about the efficacy of voodoo, how the wounded effigy injures the enemy. But Augustus has by now told him all about Ernest. The man has a room in his house with the walls entirely covered in mirrors; and there are strange contraptions in that room, engines designed to facilitate or enhance his sexual shenanigans. A chap in Chelsea builds them to your specifications and needs, no matter how byzantine or bestial a need may be. Does this, wonders Edward, explain the new relationship with Wales? The Regent is always looking for novel pleasures, even if he’s probably no longer capable of indulging in them. He’s capable of watching them, though. You wonder what a 40-stone body is still able to do, or to do with the aid of customized copulatory engines. You wonder how a mortal coil, even one uncoiled to that size, can stand up to the constant, the insistent daily abuse. But, he decides, ultimately you can’t imagine it involved in any kind of coitus, any kind of anything, except bedrerst.  Of course, Wales and body are not standing up to the abuse, indeed not standing up much at all these days: He’s frequently sick; although, when laid up, he uses alcohol along with opium as medicine. So even in sickness there’s no real respite from the siege against himself.

               As one of the less bum-licking Whig cabinet ministers had recently remarked to Edward, Wales is now finding that the Regency involves more work than he’d anticipated it would or even could. Indeed, it’s far more work than he’s been accustomed to doing at all on any regular basis, not that the basis of his life has ever been remotely regular in any sense of the term. This, Edward realizes, must explain his insistence that there be no discussions of politics or the war at his table tonight. It might remind him of work, or the idea of work. At nearly three times the Duke of Kent’s sturdy bulk, Wales is really a poor wee thing still trying to eat himself into some sort of humanity and some sort of authentic life. What does it say about gaining the whole world and losing your own soul? Something, that much is certain – something you’d never dare tell Wales in case he ate you too.

                 Leaving this gruesome bacchanal as soon as possible, Augie and he take young Charlotte back to Windsor, intending to visit the King while they’re there.

              “Grandpapa doesn’t see or hear you,” says the Princess Royal matter-of-factly. “So, a visit is really pointless, isn’t it?”

              ‘Honour thy mother and they father,’ says Edward piously, instantly wishing he hadn’t.

               They want to visit their father all the same, perhaps to honour him; but they now need to request that a doctor unlock the King’s door– so he’s unquestionably a prisoner here, with a jailer and a cell. As the physician fumbles with his great ring of keys, music can be heard, sweet music. Inside they find King George playing a Handel motet on his pianoforte, Amelia’s ring prominent on a bone-white finger. Occasionally he sings in a ghostly voice, unable to hear himself anymore. He still plays well, though – very well. They try making their presence known, but he’s simply unable to register anything. At one point he stops playing and begins talking to Amelia, telling her to fetch Octavius and Alfred, the royal brothers who died as babes. Amelia seems to have brought them, because the King starts talking as if they’re present, inquiring about their studies and their riding lessons. Abruptly, he turns back to his keyboard and resumes the motet precisely where he left off. At the end, the King just stares ahead with sightless eyes, his fingers still poised over the keys as if about to play more. His white hair glows in the lamplight, as his old head tilts slightly from side to side. A thin whistling noise comes from his cavernous nostrils. Several dinners have left part of their menu on his loose cotton jacket.

              ‘Ah,’ he says; and that is all he says: ‘Ah.’

              Edward and Augie attempt embraces and kisses; but these go unnoticed. It’s as if they are the ghosts and their world unreal. The King is in another world. It’s disconcerting; and it’s upsetting too. The father they used to know, and used to fear is here, and yet he’s not here. You wonder if any of us is really where we think we are. Who decides which private world will prevail? At least in His Majesty’s world the loss of loved ones appears to be unknown. This baleful thought is all that gives them some small reason to imagine there might be a mote of happiness in their father’s terminally isolated and interminably long days. You need something to hold on to at such times as this; anything will do. But don’t let lt go.

-xii-

                Back at Castle Hill, another covert letter from the Baron de Vincy awaits him, bringing the great war so close he can almost taste the gunpowder and smell those gravid corpses.  A hundred miles from Moscow, the holiest of holy cities, Prince Mikhail Kutusov takes up command of the Russian army near the village of Borodino. The sacred icon of the Black Madonna is paraded through lines of kneeling soldiers by priests dressed in full regalia, offering chalices of communion wine, offering the cross as a sign. This incites fanatical devotion and tearful dedication in those faces crowded there like so many damp flowers in the rain. Russia has a poetic soul, and her sons will fight to the death for the dark mother of God. The aged commander is cheered by his men, as his carriage rolls slowly along the reverent lines. Kutusov is now too fat and too old to ride a horse; yet he’s still idolized by the men, who would follow him to hell, and maybe will. They want to fight this invader, this despoiler of Holy Mother Russia; they regard Barclay’s retreats as an unconscionable humiliation. But they will not be retreating from Borodino, where the only major battle of this momentous war takes place. Kutusov carefully selects a piece of ground for his first confrontation with Napoleon, who is adamantly certain there must be a battle to defend Moscow. And this is it; but the cost is too high. At the end of the day, it’s said there are 100,000 dead and horrendously wounded on both sides – yet both sides call it a victory. Had Napoleon sent his Imperial Guard into battle, the French might have legitimately won; but he refused to risk them, so the Russians were able to withdraw to safer ground. Had Kutusov renewed the struggle at first light, the Russians might have won; but instead he ordered a retreat to Moscow; and by dawn the French had no one to fight, on a field littered with the dying and dead, and little in the way of physic or physicians to aid them. Convinced Alexander will sue for peace at Moscow – he must, why else am I here? — Napoleon orders his men to set off and claim the greatest prize of all before the capital, which was moved from Moscow to Petersberg a year earlier. The emperor has been sick for weeks too, and at one point he lost his voice entirely, forced to write out his orders. He didn’t like that. But when he arrives, Moscow is deserted, most stores, provisions and supplies gone, and no sign of the Russian forces, who’ve now withdrawn again, this time to Petersberg. As he surveys the abandoned houses, clustered around the Kremlin’s glittering onion domes, the city begins to burn. Incendiaries are setting fire to it, and no engines remain to douse the blaze. The wooden houses in their narrow winding lanes burn uncontrolled for a week, and over three-quarters of the city is destroyed, while Napoleon sends emissaries to the czar, offering a very conditional peace. Certain Alexander will respond, certain. he waits in the charred ruins as autumn fades, evenings grow cold and flecks of an early snow are blown around by the chill night wind. There is only a silence from Petersberg, and he contemplates withdrawing to winter quarters at Smolensk; but he loathes months of inaction while campaigning – idle men are troublesome, as we know – so he continues to wait, his men restless and on edge, the smell of smoke all they can taste, and scavenging for whatever scraps are left all they have to occupy their time. Officers buy looted teasures from their men at stalls in the streets, paying them a pittance for marvels. What is Paris saying? This is increasingly on Napoleon’s mind now. Paris. He’s heard to remark that his capital city is. ‘like a woman, requiring constant attention to prevent her from intriguing…’

              But he couldn’t prevent his own woman from intriguing, and now she’s gone. 

 

-xiii-

Queen Victoria’s Secret: Chapter 15.2

-vi-

               ‘What has happened?’ he asks Maria Fitzherbert, who’s now using the Knightsbridge house as her London home. ‘Your message sounded so…well, so desperate…’

              ‘It is desperate, Edward,’ she says. ‘I’ve done something very stupid…’ There are dark smudges below her eyes, which glow red from an epic of weeping. She’s deathly pale, and her wooden teeth clack like castanets as she speaks. What she’s done, however, doesn’t seem so stupid. The Prince of Wales – who must now be called the Prince Regent — has cast her aside again, taking up with the volatile and much misliked Lady Hertford. To show off his new mistress to a few hundred of his closest friends, Wales has planned a great banquet to be held at Brighton Pavilion. With the kind of cruelty usually reserved for poor Caroline, Wales has insisted that Maria attend this dinner – presumably so he can flaunt his lithesome young society trollop before her. Maria had refused to attend. Wales, who cannot be refused anything, is roasting with a rage akin to lunacy, smashing his way through Carlton House like a rogue elephant. Maria is much liked by the family for her calming influence on the Regent, so York and Clarence have tried to make Wales see reason and make up with her. But instead of being listened to they were chased down Piccadilly by Wales wielding a Turkoman scimitar. His fury over being refused will not abate, says Maria.

               ‘I think you did the right thing,’ he says, watching a bronze leaf fall from the larch tree outside and spin down to become food for the garden. We all end up as food, he thinks. It seems better than dust. The world is one vast gullet, ceaselessly consuming itself and all things that are. ‘Why should you subject yourself to such humiliation?’ he asks her.

              ‘No,’ she says, ‘that’s not the very stupid thing…’

             ‘I see. And?’

            ‘When Georgie confronted me,’ says Maria, ‘I told him you had advised me not to attend…’

               ‘Ah.’ Christ! he thinks. Why not tell him we had a bacchanalian orgy with Caroline and little Charlotte… on top of his Rembrandt? ‘Ah, I see,’ is all he can usefully say.

               ‘I’m so sorry, Edward,’ she says, touching his elbow with a trembling hand. ‘It just flew out of my mouth. I wasn’t thinking straight. His rages always affect my nerves…’

               ‘What’s done is done,’ he tells her, the phrase leaking its meaningless platitude like rain, as he squeezes her tiny quivering hand with his great paw. He thinks: Yes, flew out of your mouth and slapped up against the library ceiling, where Wales can now watch it there every day, shuddering like aspic, and growing larger, growing uglier. ‘We all say foolish things in the heat of the moment,’ he says, in a kindly tone. Why not say nothing in a kindly tone?  ‘You know George: his moods are like summer storms…’

              ‘Not this one,’ Maria tells him gravely. ‘He curses you; he calls you ‘King of Meddlers’ and says he’ll make you suffer… Suffer!  I told him you hadn’t really advised me, that I’d lied about it – but he won’t believe me…’

              ‘Ah. I see. Well…’ A pause. He can’t afford to offend the Regent, in whose hands his fate now rests. But what to do about this? For want of any obvious or feasible solution, he later sends Maria a letter: What has passed on this occasion renders it utterly necessary for me to implore you, whenever I have the happiness of seeing you again, to never touch upon that most delicate subject, the state of things between the Prince and yourself… He imagines this note could be produced when Wales accuses him of meddling. See, I told you I forbade Maria to mention your personal problems with me… No, it wasn’t very good, was it? 

                But he hears nothing from his eldest brother – and nothing is not a good sign in the Regent’s case. Yet there is a slight and unexpected comfort in company.  Edward’s other brothers are also nervous about their future under a man best known for his capriciousness, cruelty and irrationality. There are many whispered meetings in private homes. How best to deal with him? How best to behave with him? Edward has even begun to dye streaks of grey out of the fashionable mutton-chop side whiskers he now sports, just in case Wales considers him too old for an important posting, or even an unimportant one. He also does the best he can with the few wires of hair left on his shiny pink pate, growing the abundance above his ears a foot long, so he can glue sheaves of it across his skull. At 43, he’s now aware the prime has passed; so, he must look fitter than he had at 33 to dispel any impressions of decreptitude. What with the war, that new command just might appear – it just might. Why shouldn’t it? The war seems to be approaching a peak of some sort – or a trough. He lifts weights; he runs; he does 200 sit-ups daily, and 200 push-ups; he climbs a rope attached to the elm in Castle Hill’s garden; he lives in hope, the sole tenant of Pandora’s box – which he’s always envisaged as a coffin. But hope has moved out, moved on. All the same, soon he’s fitter than he was at 23. But still no word comes from the Regent. He thinks: Well, at least I’m not being summoned to my execution – surely, he’s not too angry to express his anger, is he? The old familiar anxiety over this great British silence impels him to take other steps to mollify the man, bum-kissing steps, as his father would call them. In two unctuous speeches in the House of Lords, he objects to an act designed to limit the Regent’s powers. This is something many once wanted, even him — but no more. He further organizes a petition, which is signed by 32 peers, to protest these same proposed limitations. Well, he thinks, rationalizing his actions, if I were regent, I’d not want limitations on my power, would I? So why should he suffer them? Would I want my powers of toadying limited? That’s the question.

               At Luneberg, back when he was sixteen, there was an officer in training who always toadied up to the commandant in a sickening manner. One day he reported an impropriety committed by a fellow trainee. The commandant punished that trainee with extra guard duty; and then he called for the toady, who was informed that he too would be punished: for being a snitch. His punishment was licking clean the boots from a squadron of engineers working all day in the marshes digging drainage ditches. He performed this task in the parade square, where his fellow officers passed by frequently, calling out names, mocking him. He never told another tale or toadied ever again. It had been a lesson to Edward, though evidently not a sufficiently thorough lesson to dissuade him from this current shameless toadyfest. He imagines having to kneel in Pall Mall and lick clean a thousand pairs of mucking-out boots from the Regent’s stables. Yet what else can he do but toady his way through this uncertain new world, this uncertain new Wales? Edward confesses to himself that he’s become a superfluous man. His field marshal’s baton only comes out of its crimson velvet case these days when he’s ordered by the Duke of York’s secretary or a minor aide to inspect a regiment in a purely ceremonial manner. He always finds many faults with the men, but he doesn’t say a word; that’s not his function anyway. He’s now just an effigy, draped in gold braid and wheeled out for events too boring or trivial for anyone else to bother with. If he reprimanded men he’d be laughed at as a parody of the nit-picking martinet that York’s slanders have now made him in all the barrackrooms and officers’ clubs from Land’s End to John O’Groats. He’s heard the irritating rhymes: 

               For shaving rashes, a thousand lashes; Late to bed, shoot him dead; Laces unstrung, that man hung…

               Ambition wanes when you’re so insignificant, so superfluous that even the jokes grow old and stale. 

                The war has also now made his charity work difficult, with most able-bodied men conscripted, and their families too hard-pressed to think about education. Women and children must labour long hours just to put food on the table. Money seems to be the solution to most of today’s pressing problems; and he’s donated considerable sums to purchase necessities for the poor – or he had until Mr. Coutts had forbidden him in the severest terms from donating funds he did not have. Now he raises money through proxies; but money itself is in short supply these days. Life is on hold; England is on hold, it seems, until the war is over. But he cannot afford to be on hold. It’s not in his nature.

‘You’re right about that,’ says Julie, struggling to sound patient. ‘For heaven’s sake, go out and do something! You’re driving me crazy pacing up and down here…’ She doesn’t have the heart to go on, but she easily could, with a list a hundred items long.

-vii-

              American forces defeat a tribal army led by the charismatic Tenskwatawa, whose brother is known as the Prophet; and the earth itself responds to this: a massive earthquake in the Mississippi River Valley alters the Missouri River’s course for a while. The omens and portents are especially active as the year 1812 begins. By the time it ends the wheel of history will have turned sufficiently to make the beginning unrecognizable. The reaction against change is everywhere, from the restless Indian tribes resisting America’s inexorable drive further west, to the Luddites raging against the machine all across northern England, and Napoleon in Paris planning his punishment of the Russian czar, who has changed his mind dramatically about their alliance, and kicked their putative friendship to Siberia. The very air trembles with discord; and you can taste blood on the north wind.

               He’s been visiting the Princess Royal, little Charlotte, weekly in her apartments at Windsor, where she’s utterly isolated and has no friends. Her father never comes, and her mother is forbidden. He also invites her out to Ealing regularly for the weekends Wales had approved. There’s a dual purpose to this: it’s for her delight, of course; but it’s partly to fill the gaping hole in Julie’s life caused by the wrenching departure of her sons. Jean de Mestre has, as we know, returned to Canada with the Woods; and young Eduard, having completed his training at Woolwich, has now been sent to fight with Wellington in Spain. She’s not happy about this posting; and he’s not happy Wellington is doing His, Edward’s, job.

                “It’s only because you want to join Wellington but can’t,” Julie had complained bitterly, when she first heard the news. “You should have had him posted to Canada, where he could at least see his parents and be safe. You’re always so selfish!”

              “These are glorious days for any soldier,” he tells her, tired of her unwarranted accusations. “He wanted the honour, and he would have resented me for denying it to him. Besides, his parents have Charles over there…”

              “One son instead of four? Only you with your rotten childhood could think children can be parcelled up and mailed around willy-nilly…It’s you who yearn for honours,” she says, her voice creaking with a rage barely held beneath the surface. “He only wanted to please you because he was still under the illusion that you’re a big man over here — instead of…”

              Little Charlotte cuts off the impending insult by entering the drawing room and saying, “Are you two fighting again?”

              “It’s a discussion, my love,” he tells her, in the way adults do, “not a fight…” 

              “That’s what my Papa always says when he smashes the furniture,” she tells them knowingly. She knows too much for one so young. “But I know the difference,’ she then says. ‘I’m not a baby anymore. Were you fighting about me?”

              “Of course not, darling,” Julie assures her. You’d think her maternal nature itself had been impugned. “Why would we do that?”

              “Everyone fights about me,” Charlotte states cheerily, “so why should you two be any different? I’m not a cretin, you know. I understand these things now.” You’re inclined to believe she does – poor baby.

              “Then understand,” he says, too abruptly, “that Madame Julie and I were discussing our godson’s posting to fight in Spain.”

             “He’s lucky then,” says Charlotte, “because simply everyone at Windsor wants a chance to fight Boney the Ogre. The equerries are always whining about running errands when they could be making history. They say it will be embarrassing to tell their grandchildren that their role in the greatest war ever was taking mail to London…”

             “You see,” he tells Julie, concealing a gloat of triumph, “Eduard is doing what others can only dream of…”

             “Dreams can often become nightmares,” she cuts in quietly, sounding as if she’s possessed of that arcane island knowingness, the kind of sight that sees around time’s bend. 

What he wonders is how you know you want to see what’s hidden around there. Once seen, whatever it is, your future will be a swift or slow slide towards it. Into the arms of joy or the claws of horror, to Edward it holds no attraction.

-viii-

              Rain is a symbol of grace, so they say, which also freely falls from heaven. There’s nothing graceful about these floods, though – nothing at all. Yet again England is under water, and people are rowing or punting along the highways. Another great advantage of the steam trains, we learn now, is that they aren’t much affected by flooding; they just snort, clank and hiss their way through three feet of mud as if it were air. Tracks are criss-crossing the country these days, a steel web bringing coal from Newcastle, taking wool from Wiltshire and cheese from Cheshire, taking whatever’s available to wherever it’s wanted. This modern age will be marked by efficiency. Along with the web of canals, the nation’s arteries circulate their blood as efficiently as we ourselves do – most of us, that is. There’s a difficulty here, however: some railway lines to the northern shires are rather quiet, because little has been manufactured up there since the French embargoed our imports of raw materials. The potteries are doing well, and so are the mines; but the mills can barely manage a quarter of their usual output – and even that is largely due to a resumption of the trade in Russian hemp. Czar Alexander is thumbing his nose at Napoleon. We hope he’s put his army back together, and that the newly freed serfs will want to fight in it now they don’t have to. But it eventually turns out that they do have to – the weather of Alexander’s mind will change again; and then it will again change. Every five years, so Metternich says.

              But this global ballyhoo recedes swiftly into a distant background when a letter is delivered to Castle Hill Lodge by equerry. It’s from a senior officer commanding the Royal Fusiliers in India, which is where Maurice and Chevalier de Salaberry have been posted to fight in the war against recalcitrant rajkumars, nose-thumbing nawabs and mettlesome maharajas. The letter is brief, yet far from perfunctory. Both Salaberry boys, it says, have died from dysentery within a few weeks of each other; and they’ve been buried in the same mausoleum at Calcutta’s British Cemetery. Every officer contributied to the cost in ‘a small tribute’ to the ‘fondest memories’ of … well, of him, of the Duke of Kent. Such memories are evidently still held dear by his old regiment. How hated and feared could he have possibly been? A marble obelisk was erected for the brothers’ tomb, its inscription saying that their guardian, Prince Edward, had once commanded the regiment to which they gave their lives. Above this inscription is carved, he learns, the eye in a triangle, as an anonymous nod from one brother mason to another.  

              “My God,’ he groans, ‘how am I going to tell Louis this?”  

              “God only knows,” she says, ‘because I have no idea. But this is not about you!’ She’s obliged to sit down in case she faints, unfastening the buttons on her high lace collar. “How can you possibly tell parents their children are dead? Surely no words exist for such a dreadful message? But no doubt you’ll find some…” It’s said in a whisper so quiet you can’t discern if it’s a slight or just a simple fact.

                A few weeks later, they both discover how the army itself performs this impossibly dreadful task, when Lieutenant-General Weatherall himself, temporarily assigned to supervising training at the Duke of York’s headquarters, arrives panting at the house. “I thought it best I bring this myself,” he says, wheezing and handing Edward an official document.

              With a terrible presentiment, he opens the letter to learn that his son, their son, their ‘godson’, young Eduard de Salaberry, had been killed during the storming of Badajos. The fighting was unusually ferocious and bloody, writes the boy’s commanding officer; many died, but Eduard fought on heroically right up to the end. His sacrifice had not been in vain, the letter concludes, for it helped us gain a great victory. He would be sorely missed by his comrades, and all who knew him as an exemplary soldier, aimiable, kind, genourous, and fearlessly brave.

             “Thank you, Fred,” he tells Weatherall, his voice coming from deep inside a cave or tunnel. “Will you forgive me if I don’t invite you in?’ he says, wondering if he himself will ever be invited in again. ‘I’ve no idea how to tell Madame Julie this. No idea at all…”

             “Without the letter,” Weatherall says, swallowing back his feelings, “I’d have had no idea how to tell you. I still have no idea what to say… What can you say to this?”

              “No words, Fred. No words. Your love is all I need right now; and I know I have it. Thank you for coming yourself…’

              ‘God, Edward. I couldn’t have sent a stranger…’

               ‘No, I suppose not. But York would have…’

               ‘But he doesn’t know who Eduard really is…I mean was…’

             ‘True, Fred…’

              Alone with the letter, sorrow climbs up inside him, a black spider snaring the heart in its black webs. He heads up to his library as stealthily as possible; but he’s not stealthy enough.

              “What’s happened?” Julie says, meeting him on the landing. ‘You look positively awful…’ 

             All he can do is hand her the letter. He has no words for this at all. Nor does she. There are none. They just stand there, pale, trembling, unable to breathe properly, the letter held as if it’s a treaty just blown in burning from Hades. The price is no less than all you have… 

             ‘It’s my fault,’ he says, after what seems to be an hour has passed. ‘You were right…’

             ‘It’s no time for recriminations,’ she says, leaning into his strong arms. ‘I know you loved him as much as I – and it’s all that matters now. Love is all we can ever give him now…’

             They say that losing a child can destroy your relationship, since you can never again look at one another without reviving your grief and loss. A cold shadow has fallen over their life – to be sure it has, icy and dark. He’s uncertain if it will ever leave, uncertain if a sufficient light will be able to enter again and dispel the endless night. 

               She says: “I can’t write to Souris so soon after the others. I can’t – it wouldn’t be right. Now she has only one son instead of four. Thank God you had Charles posted back to Canada. Thank God!’ He wonders how it’s possible for him to have done something right here. ‘She’ll understand our grief will be immense this time, won’t she?’ says Julie. ‘That will excuse the delay in writing, won’t it?” 

               This concern for etiquette amazes him. Is this how she deals with the worst news on earth – by being practical? The clockwork that makes a woman tick is endlessly surprising, often profound, always mysterious. By comparison, men are mules hauling a baffling weight  on a crude cart  along life’s highways or goat tracks, never admitting what’s wrapped up in there, never finding the words, less still the emotions. 

               He nods his hasty agreement to her proposals and decisions. As ever, she’s right. The house is burning, yet she’s calm, cool as ice. It is unusual, though not unwanted. In the middle of a normal day, death comes uninvited. You don’t invite him; he invites himself. There he is, with his black cowl and scythe, to mow us all down for food, for a ravenous nature that is our nature and the nature of the world. He’s been told that the Mussalman faith says the Angel of Death perches on the headboard of your bed, extracting your soul as if pulling up an anchor. Then you must cross a bottomless abyss on a razor thin wire. When you’re half way across, arms out, legs shuddering, a dark wind blowing hard, a hideous old hag rushes at you, trying to wrestle you off balance. ‘And then what happens?’ he’d asked the friend who told him this. ‘No one knows,’ said the friend. ‘It seems likely that no one makes it across, doesn’t it?’ Where was this ‘across’? he now wonders. Where were you heading? What happened to the Angel of Death? Is it your body that must walk the wire without a soul? Or is it the soul in an astral body? He likes the pedagogy of last things, the pedagogy of eschatology; he collects these afterlife dramas. Thought keeps grief away for a spell. But an Englishman is not supposed to have emotions in public; you go to your room and you don’t come out until they’re over, until yoou’re done with them. They both seem to deal with this in the same way, though: in their rooms. Perhaps the shock and sorrow are too great for any expression of them? No one ventures to remark that the family they could never have is now the family they can never have. 

             Death is dealt with in curious ways. A week or so later, they receive a parcel of young Eduard’s belongings from Spain. Amongst them is a letter the boy had written to him, to the Duke of Kent, on the eve of that fatal battle, as if he knew for certain his life was approaching its culmination. He wrote : I am ordered to storm one of the breaches this evening; as the service is rather dangerous, and I may or may not return, I beg leave to assure Your Royal Highness, as well as Madame, that whatever may happen to me I shall at every moment feel how much I am indebted to you. Believe, Sir, that my last moment shall be to wish all the happiness which you as well as Madame so eminently deserve. I have the honour to be, with eternal gratitude, Your Royal Highness’s most obedient and grateful servant…

             “He knew he was going to die,” says Julie, holding the crumpled paper to her heart. “Yet how curious that what he knows will be his last letter is written to you… or to us, and not to the Salaberrys. Do you think he…” She trails off, staring at the ceiling, and to heaven above it, where her God gazes down benevolently. Yet He’s not so benevolent, is He?

              Edward completes her thought: “…that he sensed, or even knew we were his real parents?” It’s his belief too. Or he wants it to be.

             “Yes,’ she says. ‘Is it possible?”

             “When your instinct tells you death is near, who knows what else it may reveal? I do believe there are faculties in us about which our modern science knows nothing: because they can’t be weighed or measured, and they don’t appear upon command.” Yes, he thinks, it’s true enough. He then says, “And they may come from somewhere else…”

            “From God?” This would be her preference for the source of blessings.

            “Yes,’ he agrees. ‘It’s a good enough name for the mystery, isn’t it? God. Yes, indeed. God…’

             This life is but an thoroughfare of woe,

And we been pilgrymes going to and fro…

-ix-

               As spring approaches, disguised as drear midwinter, no one thinks or talks about anything but the news from Europe. Even the Luddites, encouraged by praise from Lord Byron himself, cease their ignorant riot and make someone read the papers to them, so they can begin to stagger from the Middle Ages into this fantastic modern age. The papers they will read, or at least hear, have also advanced, or a few of them have, tottering with their pints of porter out of gossip’s gutters onto the broad pavements of public service. They even print several pages of reasonably-verified news. But what news!

                 With an army reported to be 800,000 strong, Napoleon seems poised to invade Russia. He no longer trusts Czar Alexander, who has broken too many promises. The French have 100,000 horse and carry enough oats and hay to feed them each twenty pounds a day, for there will be nothing to eat on the barren steppes of Muscovy. The baggage train also carries rations for all these men, along with powder, shot, weaponry, medicines, boots and extra uniforms. Coming along too with this horde are many of their wives, lovers, hangers-on and camp followers. There is a carnival aspect to such vast armies. But the logistics are confounding. The emperor has never campaigned like this before; his most successful battles were fought with rarely more than 200,000 troops; speed has always been his secret, but with such a vast force speed will be impossible. Edward thinks: This sort of lumbering baggage train was the Prussian handicap. I saw it; I served under its weight; I suffered from it. Why is he making the same mistake? According to Vincy’s informant, Napoleon is now feeling his age. He’d always seen himself retired at 40 and pursuing gentler arts; so, at 43, he now compensates for the loss of agility and energy with sheer size. Edward, now 44, also gets from Weatherall copies of our agent Sir Robert Wilson’s reports from St. Petersberg, where Wilson is sedulously preparing to lead a Russian regiment if the French invade. Wilson says the country is rich in horses: swift, hardy creatures bred in the wild by Cossacks, who can ride them, he says, like the Devil. The Russian army, he tells us, is entirely reorganized, perhaps not as well-equipped as the French, nor as large, but far fiercer and more courageous. Unlike the French army, which is comprised of many nationalities, they’re all ethnic Russians and speak a common language. They’ll fight to the bitter end for God and their sacred soil; whereas Napoleon’s men only fight for him and a vague idealogy, or even vaguer promises of national sovereignty back in some godforsaken midden on the Turk’s doorstep. The czar will not lead his soldiers, though. He’s still chastened by Austerlitz. Instead, he’s put his mimister of war, Barclay de Tolley, a Baltic German, in temporary charge. This has angered some senior generals, like Wittgenstein, Bennigssen and Bagratian. Wilson thinks that the commander will eventually be Field Marshal Prince Mikhail Kutusov, who’s in his late sixties, and is grossly overweight, with one eye, but an impressively heroic career behind him. Kutusov has just come trailing his own clouds of bloody glory from victories over the Ottomans, victories which have secured Russia’s vulnerable south-eastern borders. More to the point, the rank and file adore him. Alexander really has no other choice for a commander able to go up against Napoleon. Wilson hints at a secret strategy too – but it’s secret, so we don’t know what it is. The Russians do seem ucannily certain of a French invasion, however, and their certainty is vindicated daily, as Napoleon heads slowly for Dresden, where his main army is encamped. According to Vincy’s man, a carnival armosphere reigns during this stage-managed procession. The road to Dresden has been resurfaced to make the emperor’s progress smooth; fires and coloured lights line it on either side, with cheering locals at an all-day party, as the hundreds of ornate French carriages roll by. Children are held up to get a glimpse of the great man and his empress. The kings of Saxony and Westphalia – Napoleon’s brother Jerome is now on that throne –are there to greet him and pay homage. Prussia’s defeated monarch, Frederick William III, comes out personally to grovel before the Master of Europe, who treats him ‘like a drill sergeant’. The city is brilliantly illuminated too, with fireworks, pig roasts, opera, masses in the cathedral, clog dancing, and barrels of beer – and this is just all through the night. During the day there are boar hunts, logging contests, pugilism, a beauty contest, many, many speeches, and no doubt numerous other Teutonic entertainments, most involving frothy beer swigged from ceramic buckets.

                Napoleon is heard to remark, ‘How glorious it is to have all the kings of the earth at my feet — except the Sultan, the Czar and the mad King of England…’

               Ah, dear me, Edward thinks. Don’t poke sticks at the lion unless you’re sure his cage is locked shut and you have the key. But our brave old lion is permanently locked away, and no one has the key. It is simply not possible to envisage the Prince Regent involved in any battle, except the one to haul him from his stupor and off to bed at night. It reputedly now takes nine footmen to lug Wales’ carcas from ballroom to bedroom. The King is ill; but what’s the Prince Regent’s excuse? 

                Vincy’s anonymous informant believes that the reasons Napoleon has given for attacking Russia are specious. In truth, he fears the czar as his only rival, fears he will ally with England for a war on two fronts – three if you count Spain; and four if Ottomans join the alliance. Therefore, he must defeat the Russians conclusively, and then be free to focus on Britain. Yet, we now find, Czar Alexander is evidently still offering peace at this late hour, in a letter sent to Dresden. All he asks of Napoleon in return for this peace is Sweden. As the Prussian festivities blaze on, with dancing in the streets, clowns in the streets, a division of fetching flaxen frauleins in the streets, with marching bands, and yelling faces crammed into every open window, the letter ends with a question: Will the emperor invade, or is this just a show of arms to rattle Alexander back into obedience? 

              Napoleon has said, ‘War is a foolish art; it just consists of being stronger in a certain place…’ But he says many things, far too many, often contradicting himself. It can be regarded as a flaw. It can be, but something else must also be weighed in the balance: A genius is allowed to do that, indeed, to do anything at all – as long as he wins. 

               ‘By God! This is the time to be in Canada, eh?’ says Weatherall, cheerily walking into Edward’s Castle Hill office.

               ‘Canada?’ he roars incredulously, looking up from a smudged double-entry ledger. ‘Don’t you mean Granada… or on the continent somewhere?’ If spark or verve are there, you can’t see them.

              Not a man much given to excitability, Weatherall darts about like a child whose lizards have escaped. ‘Haven’t you heard?’ he says.

                ‘Heard what, Fred? You know I loathe the rhetorical…’ He tells this to the ledger sprawling across the handsome whorls of his cherrywood desk, which is made for battle plans, poems, novels, even plays, but not ledgers.

               Weatherall can barely contain himself, and his news now tumbles out like coal from a sack. ‘The Yanks have declared war on us,’ he cries. ‘It’s war, Edward!’ 

              ‘The devil they have!’

               But, devil or not, they have, perhaps taking advantage of our European distraction. It’s being called ‘Mr. Madison’s war’, after the current president – what is he, their sixth, or maybe seventh? The Americans imagine they have a sufficient stack of grievances to warrant a war, but they’re new boys at our school, still wet behind the ears. True, we’ve impressed some 10,000 of their merchant sailors into the Royal Navy; and we’re encouraging and arming Indian tribes to fight their settlers and slipshod soldiery west of the Ohio River. But you don’t start an intercontinental war over such piddling trifles, do you? No, it’s only an excuse to make another grab for Canada. This time we’re going to have to make them regret it so bitterly, teach them a lesson so severe that they’ll never pull the same stunt ever again. Damn nuisance though, shipping armies to and fro across thousands of miles of perilous black water. Not again, surely?

                 It isn’t going to be a big war, but, Edward thinks, the Salaberrys can’t be too happy about seeing their only remaining son now journeying off to Niagara for the conflict. Like Louis de Salaberry, Edward had been divided over the issue of whether we ought to assemble a massive land force in Canada and take back our colonies. Not any more. The Yanks have started it, so it behooves us to finish the business, finish it to our satisfaction: hang the traitors, free those poor slaves, make equitable and honourable treaties with the native tribes, and then get back to more promising issues – like seizing for ourselves a tropical empire extending from Mexico to… where? Maybe Tierra del Fuego – but who knows? No doubt our American cousins will be overjoyed to be finally spared the irksome, tortuous, unprofitable and probably impossible task of trying to construct an egalitarian state, or really a democratic phantasmagoria resembling the old Athenian model merely by one word – democracy – and to construct it without plans, even without any certainty that such gimcrack utopianism can work – which human nature, along with Rousseau, tells us it cannot. Edward’s been told that a dozen or so plutocrats already own everything worth owning and explain it all away to the churls by convincing them that this is a country where anyone can make millions, supported simply by the energy, desire and will to do it. It’s an immense continent, and no one yet owns most of the land – although the Indians have a puzzling caveat on this subject – but someone must own it, sooner or later. Probably sooner, since we hear western states, ones of questionable legality, have begun giving land away for free to encourage migration westwards. For free! What kind of governance is that? You may be safe in Boston, Philadelphia, maybe New Orleans; but millions of square miles west of the Mississippi all the way to the Pacific coast are lawless, ruled by brute force and firearms, presided over by warlord gang leaders, whose wealth comes from theft, whose power is in the barrel of a gun, whose vast domains are all potential – and may remain that way, untapped, unused, left to wasteful nature, while its stewards carouse, plunder, murder and practice all the arts of rapine. What decent person wants to dwell in such a place? However, what man of means and ability does not want to deploy his skills on such a tabula rasa? Edward and many of the men he knows now see the golden opportunity of taking back the American colonies, and then carving up all of the American vastness for themselves. Once the traitors have been executed and their militias are disbanded, of course. The very real possibility of Britannia ruling, not just the waves but the world now arises – every man his own sultan or nawab in his own country – and it is more intoxicating than opium or madragora. Edward is not alone in thinking the war should be waged before the peace and its division of spoils can even be contemplated. With millions at war in Europe, where hundreds of thousands lie dead on battlefields, though, the time is too far out of joint to risk a Brit versus Ex-Brit rumble on the world’s other side – or take the idea of it very seriously at all. Perhaps, Edward tells himself, it isn’t meant to be taken seriously because, let’s face it, it is not a very serious war, this new thing in the new world. Events, which are reported in confusing great gobbets like whale spune, appear to back up his theory.

               After a failed attempt to take Quebec with a pincer movement from the west, US forces have mostly contained fighting to the southern border regions, as if they’re organizing Morris dancers or boxing tournaments. This sort of restrained non-conflict doesn’t really capture anyone’s attention here. Why would it when we have the greatest show on earth, not exactly nearby, but close enough for discomfort? You don’t watch some bow-legged teen cowboy with a bandeau on his ten-gallon hat pretend his rag-tag straw-chewing militia, all five of them, or six, are a real army, when you’ve got Napoleon, Emperor of the French, probably the greatest military leader since Alexander, Caesar and Scipio Africanus all in one, with the largest army ever assembled in all of history, about to rewrite that history without any Romanovs in Russia, and then draw up a new map of the world without any Russia. No, you aren’t watching the freezing vague Canadian border for the odd crack of birdshot. You watch the equally vague Russian border and tens of thousands of bronze cannon, many of them cast from the melted statuary of captured cities, and you watch that enormous little man in his old grey-green greatcoat and the bicorn hat with a tricolour cockade, you watch him strare passively into his spyglass, wondering what he sees in the smouldering distance. You watch and wonder east not west, because your only real concern is Napoleon’s success or, you devoutly hope, his failure in Russia – if he goes there. America is so very far away that it’s out of mind. It will remain that way, an imaginary land, a perpetual option if the chips go so far down they burn to ash. Yes, it will remain that way for a long time, even when it frantically seeks our attention, which almost anywhere else warrants for very little or even no reason at all.. We’ve sent those rebel colonists to Coventry – an idiomatic usage you need to be English to understand fully.      

               We hear much from Spain these days, for example, but we only listen to whatever concerns us directly, and perhaps a little indirectly too. Wellington is taking advantage of Napoleon’s Russian distraction to defeat the French in several battles, including one at Vittorio, after which our victor enters Spain. But Wellington and Spain invoke painful memories of little Eduard, dead and gone. Taking advantage of this Iberian distraction, perhaps, the colonies of Spanish America have all declared their independence by now, and Spain’s once immeasurable, grand and exceedingly wealthy empire all but vanishes. Poof! The Empire Entropy. But Vincy’s information has puzzled Edward. It’s so detailed that his source must surely be one of Napoleon’s generals – neither Talleyrand nor Fouchet accompanied him to Dresden. Is it Murat, his brother-in-law, now the King of Naples? Is it Eugene, his stepson, now also his adopted son, Rose’s boy, now Viceroy of Italy? It could have been Bernadotte, the only one to oppose Napoleon’s first-consulship; but he’s now presumably preoccupied as Crown Prince of Sweden. In a season of uncertainty this is but one more unanswered question. Toss it onto the pile of other questionss, shrug and move on.

                  Perhaps to assuage the grief over young Eduard’s death in his own idiosyncratic way, Edward  develops an obsessive interest in Napoleon, collecting scraps of information from numerous sources, pasting them into commonplace books, acquiring and reading whatever else exists, corresponding with men who have known, or even just encountered the emperor, consulting academic experts in warfare and military history, and even hiring the services of “Romany Rosalea’, a gypsy fortune teller, tarot reader and crystal gazer, whose cozy smoke-filled caravan is parked on Ealing Common, where her colossal meaty Clydesdale carthorse takes his leisurely lunch on Thursdays and Fridays. Edward is not gullible, but he is susceptible to the mystical once he’s convinced it’s potentially authentic. And he finds Romany Rosalea almost too authentic, her divinations of an accuracy uncanny in its exactitude, and more useful than anything else he’s come across or collected.

               ‘Right, dearie,’ says Rosalea, ‘here it be.’ She hands him the horoscope she’s drawn up from information he’d given her the previous week.

                ‘I’m afraid it doesn’t mean much to me, Madame,’ he tells her, staring down at the maze of circles, lines, squares, degrees and vectors meticulously drawn in coloured inks on fine parchment. He has not told her whose horoscope it is, and of course she has no idea who he is, in his civilian clothes, the grey frock coat, the trousers that strap under his boots, the gleaming pink dome as he removes his silk hat, and the effusive side whiskers, a little too black to be genuinely this dark.

                ‘Course it don’t, dearie,’ says the gypsy, taking back the page. ‘That’s me job, innit? Horoscopus, dearie – know what it means?’

                   ‘I do not. I’m sorry.’ And he is genuinely sorry.

‘Nah-nah, don’t be, dearie,’ says Rosalea. ‘Life’s a taddie too short for sorrowing. Iss Slatin, I means Latin, for “Oi watch the ‘mergin’ planets”. Do y’unnerstand what I say, dearie?’

                   ‘Yes. I think so.’

‘Now ‘old me ‘and, dearie, whoile Oi conseetrates on the fibrillations, Izzat awright, dearie?’

‘Yes of course.’ He feels his huge strong paw gripped by what could well be a clamp made of bone covered in dessicated chamois leather. It is unexpectedly firm, but dry as as an old box of chalk. He has a question: ‘Did you say ‘fibrillations’?’ he says, looking around at the charming little room on wheels, its small wood stove, flower-embroidered clean curtains, the yard-wide pallet of a bed, the shelves with all their curios and knickknacks, each protected from breakage by a removable wooden arm, and then of course the small square folding table at which they now sit on joint-stools, her pale avian hand on his great ruddy paw, a crystal ball next to them, rearranging the caravan and its occupants into forms better suited to existence inside a glass dome the size of a tennis ball. A clock ticks patiently; the page whispers beneath the fingers of her other hand as they trace its quadrants and elipses for something felt rather than seen.

The gypsy looks up suddenly, black eyes like the polished barrels of a gun whose ammunition is in the brain. ‘Sssh, derie,’ she says softy. ‘Oi’s conseetratin’, izzunt Oi?’ A lengthy pause. He hears her breath, her metabolic processes at work, presumably on her breakfast; and always the whispering swish of that finger assessing the geometric arteries of fate lines, planetary conjunctions, transits, and the whole network of a destiny belonging to the man who was now Master of Europe, but would not stop there. Rosalea would not stop there either. Her interpretation of the horoscope comes in a verbal torrent so swift and seamless there is no possibility of halting it or seeking to ask a query. ‘August fifteen,’ she states, also noting place and time of birth – information Julie wheedled out of Rose. ‘Sun in Leo,’ she continues. ‘Moon in Capricorn – issa man’s chart, Oi can always tell. Oh. Hmm. With that moon where it be, he’s driven – oh, wery driven, an’ monstrous ambitious wivit too. Oh. Very strong chart. His Mars is in Virgo, right there, so he’ll certain be wery good with details – you knows details, dearie? – good you, an’ wery good with ‘em he. But awlso wery secretive. He’s not a man to trust many around him – if any!’ At this point she smakcked the table and rolled back her eyes, but the disturbance hardly interrupts her flow at all. ‘Ah, loverly,’ she says in a floral voice of considerable charm, ‘His Venus is in Cancer, so he’s got a wery soft heart, he has… a wery romantic heart too. Ooh, he will have an eye for the ladies, dearie. Oh, and that eye might not be aversed to casting a glance at the boys too. Does you know what I means, dearie? Good. Oi could see you izza man o’ the whirled. Now… we have a Mercury conjunct mid-heaven. Powerful. He will be what you mights call kingly by nature, wery at home ‘mongst the royals an’ the wristocrats, he be. A leader too. Oh, men will certain follow him awright. He may even be a royal hisself, but Oi don’t see it at the birth point. Strange, dearie, ‘cause it’s there, right here’ – she pokes at a point on the chart – ‘See? His royal filations started a wee taddie later. Odd that. Hmm. Ah-hmm. Oh. You gotta Mars conjunct four degrees with Neptune here. No good, dearie. His fine qualities are counterested by a disruptiveness. Y’see, dearie, iss like he builds up nice an’ fine; but then he has the inclinatering to tear it all down. Hmm. This conjunct. Wery bad temper. You doesn’t want to be anywhere near him when the temper be breakin’ out from its cage, no, you duzzant. Four degrees. Neptune? He probly has what Oi calls a differcult relationship wiv water. D’y’understand me, dearie? I duzzant mean washin’ water or drinkin’ water. I means the great waters, the seas, oceans, ribbers, lakes – unnstand me dearie?’

He gets a word in. ‘I do indeed,’ he says, and indeed he does, recalling Vincy’s earlier letter about Napoleon’s hatred of water, ships, boats and anything else that floated – including his own useless navy.

There were many more astrological phenomena, most of them denoting traits too subtle or personal for Edward to tell if they fitted Napoleon. But when Romany Rosalea summed up the horoscope that she’d spent ninety minutes analyzing, it was a portrait of the emperor, complete with little details she couldn’t possibly have known about, even if she had guessed whose chart it was from the birthday and the place, Corsica. He thinks this is highly unlikely. Besides, there were some things she divined in the chart that hardly anyone in the world knew about. Presumably Rose did not write to all and sundry of the disappointingly miniature dimensions of Bonaparte’s genetalia. By concentrating deeply on what Edward saw as a series of infinitely subtle interrelationships, like the notes on sheet music, the gypsy had weighed multiple choices before being certain that the effect of this on that at such and such in the sign of the scorpion, five, six, seven degrees would indicate a strong proclivity for/strong aversion to/instinctive understanding of/power attraction to… And one of these little details, by no means a certainty, was “a strong likelihood of genital malformation”, which could sometimes “lead to insecurities about his maniless”, this in turn sometimes causing “an overcompensation in the form of bullying or aggression”. Rosalea had ended up with a military leader, fiercely ambitious, driven, ruthless, obsessed with details, secretive, making up for what he felt he lacked in stature and manliness by behaving like a seven-foot-tall potentate, this impression the one taken away by men drawn to his innate skills as a leader, which, she said, had dangerous qualities in them; and behind it all a passionate, romantic man, whose soft heart was easily touched by the plight of the poor or outcast, and helplessly drawn to women who possessed almost the opposite qualities to his own. There was, furthermore, the hint of homosexual tendencies, and a nervous complaint. Like epilepsy. She actually said “epilepsy, Edward tells himself, always impressed by the mystics he meets, but never more so than he is by Romany Rosalea.  

                 It is now not long before he believes he knows the man Napoleon as well, if not better than anyone close to him. The Duke of Kent still fantacizes commanding an army against the emperor, and winning those battles, thanks to this obsessive need for understanding the man. Of course, he knows this will never be now, but everyone needs a little dream to decorate the future when the future looks drab, don’t they? It has also not escaped his ninble watchmaker’s mind that he, Prince Edward, shares a good number of the same qualities revealed by that horoscope. Not the very bad ones, mercifully, or so he hopes. But certainly he has the drive, the ambition, the details, the leadership, and the “wery” soft heart, which is attracted to someone who is every bit his equal but entirely different in nature. It does cross his heated mind to have the gypsy draw up his own chart; but he pulls back from that brink by reminding himself that you really don’t want to know what your future holds. You also don’t want to be told you’re probably a homosexual, with violent tendencies, and as likely to smash anything down as you are to build it up.

‘But at least I enjoy the water and ships,’ he tells Julie, after a highly truncated precis of his experiences with the gypsy.

‘Yes,’ she says, her voice so neutral that you wonder if it’s a foreign language, ‘but you haven’t conquered half of Europe and become wealthier than Croesus, have you?’ A pause that necessitates the wrinkling up of her nose, something he’s come to regard as a “tell”, the harbinger of bad tidings. ‘No,’ she proceeds, as if answering an unheard question, ‘no, you haven’t. But you have racked up an astounding level of debt for someone – and that includes me – who owns nothing except a private public library and a fucking’ – she’s speaking French but this is the English word, presumably so he notices it, which he does – ‘a fucking ludicrously excessive collection… Oh, you can’t call it that. It’s a concatenatenation – is that the word? – a fucking ludicrously excessive concatenation of clockwork shit in gold and jewels, shit that I happen to know you paid a fortune for but now can’t even give away to pay off debts you’ll never pay off, because all you do with the unconscionably immense amounts of time on your frighteningly huge paws is incur more debts to finance this hare-brained scheme and that example of raving balderdash or those two spongers you imagine are friends. Jesu Christ almighty!’ She needs to pause for breath, but not for long. ‘Well, Highness – hah, you must be the lowest highness on record – is it sort of analogous to the conquest of Europe? You’re what? Twice Napoleon’s height, is it? Born with a head in the clouds – the ones with no lining except bloody rain – that’s you. But he’s still ten times the man you are! A hundred times!’ Tears are surely about to creep out from their well. ‘No,’ she now yells, ‘I’m not going to cry – I’m not! Squander, squander, squander. That’s you! With never a thought for our child you killed, the three boys you sent off to death. Borrow for this, borrow for that… Oh, and borrow to buy that crazy German slut some vile and tasteless little trinket you saw in those big, blue, bloodshot eyes of hers… Or was it up that fetid crack she’s got? How, how, how…’

He cannot let this go on, going over to hold her by the shoulders and say, ‘What, my love? What’s been going on?’

                  She looks up, confused, uncertain herself what is wrong with her. All she can do is shake her head.

But he knows. He also knows there’s nothing he can do to make things right again. You break some things and they’re easily repaired. You break other things and they’re gone forever. Poof! All the King’s horseguards and most of his men can never put those things back together again. Yet one man will try his best.